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FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
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Bascom, John, 1827-1911. 
The goodness of God 


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WORKS BY PROF. JOHN BASCOM. 


fsthetics ; or, Science of Beauty. 8vo, cloth 

Philosophy of Rhetoric. New edition. 8vo, cloth . 
Comparative Psychology. 8vo, cloth . : ‘ 
Science of Mind (Psychology rewritten). 8vo, cloth . 
Philosophy of English Literature. 8vo, cloth . . 
A Philosophy of Religion; or, The Rational Grounds 


of Religious Belief. 8vo, cloth : : : : 
Growth and Grades of Intell'gence. r12mo, cloth 
Ethics; or, Science of Duty. 12mo, cloth . ‘ ‘ 
Natural Theology. 8vo, cloth : : - : 
The Words of Christ as Principles of peeewal and 

Social Growth. 8vo, cloth : ‘ : M . 


Problems in Philosophy. 8vo, cloth . : . : 
Sociology. 8vo, cloth ., : ‘ : ° 
Historical Interpretation of Philosoithy. 12mo, cloth. 
Evolution and Religion; or, Faith as a Part of a 
Complete Cosmic System. 8vo ‘ ‘ 
Growth of Nationality in the United Stata an 


G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, New YORK, 


et beh 


25 
25 


Tale, GOODNESS OF 
GOD 


Seed eY 
eUbiaL gEN\NeS 


BY 


JOHN BASCOM 


AUTHOR OF ‘‘ THE NEW THEOLOGY,” ETC. 


G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 
The Rnickerbocker Press 


1901 


* 


CopyRIGHT, 1901 
BY 
JOHN BASCOM 


t 


The Knickerbocker Press, Hew Work 


Re ANC ob. 


N 1897, I gave two lectures in the Theo- 
logical Seminary at New Haven on the 
Recast of Faith. It is with some liberty that 
the following pages are said to be these lec- 
tures. Both the substance and the form have 
been so far altered in rewriting that those 
who heard the spoken words may only gain a 
glimpse of recognition here and there in what 
is now offered. 

I am glad to bid good-bye, in connection 
with so central and cheerful a theme as that 
of the goodness of God, to any who, in the 
years now closing, have taken pleasure in my 
words. 


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INTRODUCTORY TERMS . 


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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD AND THE GOODNESS OF 
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THE NATURE OF Gop’s GOODNESS 


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OBJECTIONS TO GOoD’s GOODNESS. 


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CONCLUSIONS. 


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Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are 
honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things 
are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
are of good report; if there be any virtue, if there be 
any praise, think on these things. 


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PART I. 


INTRODUCTORY TERMS. 


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INTRODUCTORY TERMS. 


UR religious beliefs have so lost their 
traditional basis, and have come to be 
so shaped by philosophical reasons, as to re- 
quire, by way of indication of their character, 
some hint of the intellectual view of the world 
which underlies them. This is the more 
necessary when we take up a detached dis- 
cussion somewhat removed from primary prin- 
ciples. This treatise on the goodness of God 
rests purely, in whatever strength it may pos- 
sess,on reason. By reason we mean no single 
power of the human mind, but the widest ex- 
ercise of all powers, at any moment possible 
to us, in the reconciliation of the physical, in- 
tellectual, and spiritual world as a coherent 
structure. Reason means our most compre- 
hensive exposition of the nature of things. 
It is forever corrected by observation, in- 
structed by experience, and enlarged by in- 
tellectual activity. 


Go 


4 Introductory Terms. 


Reason, as the most vital of vital things, can 
grow by what it casts aside; can make each 
successive stage better than the previous one, 
and yet derive it from it. Reason, like the 
strong man in motion, wins the advantage of 
every position by the energy which first 
brings him to it and then carries him beyond 
it; “Any uncertainty as’ to the! next stepaies 
uncertainty as to the present one. It is to 
reason that we appeal; that unconquerable, 
acquisitive strength of mind by which it makes 
the world evermore its own. It matters not 
what aid Revelation may render us in carrying 
on our work; our work brings us back to reason, 
God’s revelation in the soul itself. 

The philosophy which underlies this dis- 
cussion is one which equally recognizes ab- 
servation and insight; experience and that 
interpretation of experience that finds the light 
that is init. What we first know, in a super- 
ficial form, is found in perception ; what we 
know later, and in a more adequate way, is 
found in reflection. The book addresses it- 
self to the eye, but the meaning of the book 
addresses itself to the mind; and our know- 
ledge is the indivisible product of both. The 
facts of the world do not beget the apprehend- 


Natural and Supernatural. 5 


ing power, any more than the apprehending 
power begets the facts of the -world. The 
two grow together, complementary parts of 
each other. 

The most familiar example of this inter- 
lacing of diverse elements is causation and 
spontaneity. Causation sustains and extends 
spontaneity, the germ of thought and rational 
action ; and spontaneity moulds causation into 
the matrix of a higher life. Each is barren, 
both in knowledge and in use, without the 
other. The presence of both and their inter- 
dependence are facts of experience, and are 
rationally rendered as the two parts, physical 
and intellectual, of one world. This is the 
philosophy which tacitly underlies all know- 
ledge, and may well enough, therefore, be the 
accepted support of faith. 

A second, kindred contrast very prominent 
in the experience we have to interpret is that of 
the natural and supernatural. Nature stands 
for a physical world complete within itself, and 
the supernatural for a spiritual world lying 
back of the physical world, and pursuing, by 
the medium of its ministrations, its own higher 
ends. We reject neither of these two terms. 
Our philosophy lies in reconciling them. We 


6 Introductory Terms. 


find them alike potent in human experience,— 
the experience we are so anxious to under- 
stand. The spiritual universe is not built up 
of facts and the laws of facts alone, nor yet of 
the coherent visions of the mind merely ; we 
despair, therefore, of apprehending it other- 
wise than in the relation of the two to each 
other. The physical form and the spiritual 
substance are, in the universe, inseparable 
terms. 

The philosophy involved in the discussion 
is nothing more than dualism; two most dis- 
tinguishable elements, matter mv mind, neither 
of nuinel is resolvable into the other, and 
whose infinite subtilty is revealed to us in 
their extended interplay. The easy, vaulting 
movements of idealism are more pleasing than 
the slow, creeping processes of empiricism, 
yet they leave behind them far fewer traces 
of knowledge. We are content to study the 
facts, but content because, like a mirror, they 
give back a light not altogether their own. 

The supernatural element shows itself in 
everywhere bringing physical facts to the sup- 
port and furtherance of the expanding life 
they embrace; in wrapping them as a 
swaddling-band about it. The universe is 


Asking and Receiving. 7 


becoming ever more diverse in life, ever more 
intellectual in life, and the safety and nutriment 
of this movement increase apace. The evolution 
of the world is in no way aimless, but is ever 
gathering causes together as a nest for a new 
spiritual fledgling. It is on this ground prim- 
arily that the world is spiritual,—it makes for 
spiritual creations. The flow of its collective 
physical forces renders it increasingly a pure 
stream by whose reflection every beautiful thing 
is given back to itself and to the spiritual world. 
Not only is there this constructive response 
of the two elements to each other, there is 
ever a more immediate and vital interplay 
between them, shown in the manner in which 
the wants and wishes of men grow daily more 
potent. ‘Ask and it shall be given, seek and 
ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened 
unto you,” becomes increasingly the formula 
of the world. Asking, seeking, and knocking 
are one, and the world yields to them all, 
whether they express themselves in following 
up the clues of knowledge, or in casting the 
spirit gladly, with poetic insight, on the Spirit- 
ual Presence of the world. They are all 
alike efficacious in winging the mind and in 
winging the heart for a forward movement. 


8 Introductory Terms. 


If we take prayer in its most limited sense, 
we find that it has played a most productive 
part in human experience. With the lowly 
and the lofty it has shaped the purposes of 
men, and given them firmness in their pursuit. 
How many, like our Lord, have gone down a 
steadily declining path of prosperity, and with 
the words, ‘‘ Thy will be done,” have converted 
it into a sublime ascent toward righteousness 
and peace ! 

There is as the fruit of these two tenden- 
cies, the rooting of life in the world and the 
ministration of the world to life, an increasing 
sense of a pervasive Spiritual Presence,— in- 
exhaustible strength to the mind, infinite 
solace to the heart. The soul as certainly 
finds its nutriment in this conviction as the 
plant, forcing its fibers into the coarse, dark 
soil, draws thence food, flower, fragrance. 
The marvel of the flower and the earth in 
which it grows is a marvel like that of the 
pure spirit and the elements which invest it. 

We make no mention of miracles. The 
historic proof does not reach with sufficient 
firmness to them. We simply feel that there 
is no rational principle that sets them per- 
emptorily aside. The part they play will be 


Physical and Spiritual. 9 


plainer as our lives unfold. Like meteors in 
the solar system, they are mere shreds in the 
constructive process, not essential portions. 
No miracle is necessary in the spiritual king- 
dom. Most miracles are flakes struck off in 
the welding of men’s thoughts into adequate 
convictions. 

The data on which our inquiry proceeds 
are found in the physical and spiritual facts 
which enclose our lives. Both classes of 
phenomena have with us the force of realities. 
Physical facts are capable of a spiritual render- 
ing, and they, with the spiritual facts that 
spring up with them, are essential portions of 
one creation. The two offer themselves collec- 
tively for rational apprehension. There is no 
room for agnosticism, for are we not studying 
the world, studying it in its profounder render- 
ings? These renderings are the very sub- 
stance of our phenomenal knowledge. We 
are not discussing the nature of God in a spec- 
ulative and uncorrected way. We are simply 
seeking the open implications of the facts 
nearest to our own lives. 

This implies, of course, that both causes and 
reasons have free play in the world. We are 
not assuming a world of causes simply, and 


10 Introductory Terms. 


then striving to treat it as if it sprang from 
Reason and contained reasons. Our reasons 
are as primitive as our causes. We cannot in- 
troduce the question of the goodness of God 
into a world of causation simply. Goodness 
implies the knitting of causes together in a 
beneficent purpose. The tracing of causes 
alone discloses no love. It is in the inter- 
action of causes and reasons that goodness is 
revealed. As in the loom, one roller yields 
the warp and another roller takes up the 
completed web, the workman accomplishing 
his purpose in the interval between them, so 
causes and reasons, the one looking backward 
and the other forward, are united in the present 
pattern of the world, a world shaped between 
the two and judged by the two. We are in 
search of goodness, and we look for it where 
alone it can be found, in the framing of events 
into spiritual products. The discussion be- 
comes wholly illusory without a spiritual phil- 
osophy, and this philosophy we assume. We 
are not enunciating or defending such a phil- 
osophy. We are inquiring how, under this 
philosophy, the question of God’s goodness is 
to be answered. 

What is here offered will seem to some to 


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Insight. II 


lack proof. It does lack proof in the narrow 
sense. The architect presents his elevations 
and accompanies them with some exposition, 
They then lie between him and the critic to 
be pronounced upon according to the know- 
ledge and insight of the two. This is the 
very purpose-they subserve, that of disclosing 
the order and harmony present in the in- 
numerable relations they express. It is in vain 
to ask proof; they sum up too many things, 
their appeal is too comprehensive. A _con- 
viction of adequacy grows by a wide survey 
of obvious and_of obscure. relations. The 
mind takes its final position in the spiritual 
world, not by succinct steps of proof, but by 
the more secret processes of growth,—by a 
continuous revelation and silent appropriation 
which at the same time determine and disclose 
the inner and the outer coherence of things. 
Our present appeal is to insight, that insight 
which sums up all the resources of the spirit, 
intellectual and emotional. Herein lies the 
true potency of the spirit, the power by which 
it distills into consciousness through every 
pore; and secretes in the solid structure of 
one’s being all the nutritive material of a 
spiritual wonlle This is life justifying itself 


12 Introductory Terms. 


as life; not proof, but the approving of i ae 
soul to iteelt and of the universe to that which _ 


it has brought forth. 


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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD AND THE GOODNESS 
OF GOD. 


13 


As Jesus grew older, and learned more of the religious 
condition of his people, as he saw how small a place 
the idea of God’s fatherhood occupied in contemporary 
thought, and to what superficiality, selfishness, formality, 
and hypocrisy the lack of it had led, he must have felt 
increasingly the importance of it, and his countrymen’s 
supreme need of its uplifting and ennobling power.— 
A. C. McGirrert, The Apostolic Age, p. 16. 


Our Father Which Artin Heaven. 


14 


— 


eased 


THE CONCEPTION OF GOD AND THE GOODNESS 
OF GOD. 


Ne our conception of God is introduced 
as an explanatory idea, it necessarily 
changes with our conception of the world 
which is to be explained by it, and with our 
conception of those spiritual powers revealed 
to us in ourselves in whose service and under 
whose analogy we frame the idea. The no- 
tion of God must stand on such terms with the 
world as to make it more comprehensible to 
us than it otherwise would be; and on such 
terms with ourselves as to be intelligible to us, 
and in harmony with our ideas of perfect spir- 
itual life. The changeable character of our 
conception of God, the growth necessarily in- 
volved in it, render our religious life, like our 
entire life, one of vital development. 

In the beginning, guided by our own rela- 
tion to the physical world, which offers itself 
to us in an independent form to be acted on 

15 


16 The Conception of God. 


by us and shaped to our purposes, we conceive 
of God as an agent external to the material 
world, bringing it into order. When we come 
to apprehend matter as holding within itself 
both the forces and laws of construction, we 
are led to regard the spiritual life of the world 
as inherent in its physical structure. God is 
immanent in His work, as the mind of man is 
immanent in the body of man. 

/ The conception of immanence is introduced 
as more harmonious with the obvious facts of 
the world, as a more perfect reconciliation of 
physical and intellectual phenomena, and as 
giving us a more intelligible expression of the 
omnipresence and the omniscience of God. 
This conception involves a new adjustment of 
spiritual and physical facts to each other. 
Physical facts are, in human experience, the 
inseparable form of spiritual facts, and spiritual 
facts are the inner significance and force of 
physical ones. This unity and this contrast of 
the two, with which we are everywhere so 
familiar, and on which our intellectual and 
higher emotional life is constantly turning, are 
now carried up to the Supreme Spirit and 
to the world through which He is revealed to 
us. The two inhere in each other as one 


Change in the Conception ty 


comprehensive fact. This doctrine of imma- 
nence gives due weight both to physical and 
to spiritual phenomena, and unites them as 
parts of one universe. The physical law is 
held fast, but so also are its constructive rela- 
tions and spiritual significance. We accept 
the symbol, but receive with it that which it 
symbolizes. We translate the physical fact 
into the spiritual meaning it contains. We 
deal with words in connection with the ideas 
they express. The spiritual side of the world 
becomes as real to us and as intelligible to us 
as its physical side. 

In introducing this explanatory notion of 
immanence, we have occasion to modify our 
conception of God and our conception of 
matter as well. If we can no longer conceive 
of God as acting arbitrarily on the world under 
His hand, we can also no longer conceive 
of physical processes as self-sufficing in them- 
selves, and in their relations to the universe of 
which they are a part. Such a notion gives no 

‘room for God. Our personified expressions, 
nature, natural selection, genetic force, cosmic 
_ process, have taken the place which should fall 
‘to Supreme Reason, lying at the heart of 
things. They are one and all imaginative 


18 The Conception of God. 


creations which find no footing in matter, and 
which serve simply to displace spiritual powers. 

We must brush aside this swarm of personi- 
fications, that fill the air with their busy hum, 
that we may recover the deep quiet voice of 
reason, which, in the doctrine of God’s imma- 
nence, we have accepted as the central fact of 
‘the world. We are not to repeat in the world 
at large the error into which the empiricist 
falls when, amid the functions of the brain, he 
‘finds no room for the mind itself. The Divine 
Thought must lie under and with the wisdom. 
which permeates the world and makes it a 
spiritual product. The inferences of reason 
must be open to us in all directions. We are 
no more to rob the spiritual of its true signifi- 
cance than we are to deny to the physical, law 
its coherent force. Reason, conscious reason, 
light within itself and bringing light to all that 
enters its realm, must remain the central fact 
and force of our entire life. Every other 
method is irrational, in derogation of reason. 
Reason alone gives light, and it alone is revela- 
tion. So far as we possess it we see, so far as 
we want it we are in darkness. Reason must 
forever reconstruct its conceptions, trim its 
light, but it cannot be allowed to distrust its 


Reason Ultimate. 19 


Own processes. Indeed, scepticism rarely falls 
backward into this abyss. The only search, 
and the eternal search, of the world is for 
reason, and when this disappears, we pass into 
confusion and chaos. The one eternal, un- 
changeable principle is fidelity to reason, 
This it is which leads us to accept the imma- 
nence of Reason in the world. Thus and thus 
only does the world become profoundly rational, 
and our search into it an unlimited inquiry for 
truth. 

It is a profound piece of irrationalism to 
think of these magnificent physical things and 
events which enclose us, ever more subtile jn 
their implications, ever striking deeper into our 
intellectual life, ever more nutritive of the 
highest emotions, as not resting back on a 
corresponding magnitude of spiritual life, as 
not working their way onward toward a King- 
dom of Heaven, as floating meaningless in an 
empty region of illusions and inanities, This 
is making a mockery of reason in the very 
consummation of its processes. 

Evolution forces a constant reconstruction 
of our sense of the destiny of man, and of the 
means by which that destiny is being fulfilled. 
Immanence, a new coalescence of physical and 


20 The Conception of God. 


spiritual forces, a fresh denial of the exclusive 
and conflicting ways in which these two ele- 
ments have been treated, is one more product 
‘of the evolutionary idea. Immanence Is a rec- 
onciliation of mind and matter with the loss of 
neither. When we plumb to the bottom of 
things, we reach impalpable forces, forces 
forever at work under intellectual relations, 
something to be understood and to be felt. 
When we walk through the world, traversing it 
in a spirit of comprehension, we find ourselves 
last of all in the presence of God, the living 
source of truth. When we would give this 
truth the highest form of reality, we see it 
turned back before our eyes into that unending 
procession of events which surrounds us. We 
make way for God in the world, and the world 
moves with us as an ever-renewed disclosure 
of His mind. 

As long as men have but a feeble sense of 
the unity of the world, and an obscure appre- 
hension of its network of causation, the infer- 
ences by which they pass over to spiritual 
beingsare fickle and fanciful. These inferences 
involve evil spirits as readily as good spirits, 
and finite spirits more readily than an Infinite 
Spirit. The same confusion necessarily exists 


One Indwelling Life. 21 


in men’s notions of the spiritual world which 
inheres in their apprehensions of themselves 
and of the events which surround them. 
The Christian system has reduced this discord 
to its lowest expression, and yet retains it in 
its conception of Satan. 

As the creative force of the world and its 
wholly interior structure are made apparent to 
man, the conception of God becomes that of 
an indwelling spiritual life, and there is no 
room left for exterior forces or conflicting 
forces. The same tendency of thought that 
carries with it the immanence of God leads us 
also to ascribe to Him exclusive power. The 
construction of the world is complete within 
itself, and there is no opportunity to withstand 
His purpose. There is no fou sto for an ad- 
versary. Even yet this notion of definite resist- 
ance is not quite abandoned, as is shown in a 
recent ingenious work, Fvzl and Evolution. 

Our spiritual psychology, our rendering of 
the elements that enter into righteousness and 
excellence of character, are equally potent in 
modifying our conception of God. As long as 
we put will uppermost, we shall conceive of 
God as irresistible, personal power. ‘“ He isin 
one mind and who can turn Him? What His 


22 The Conception of God. 


soul desireth even that He doeth.”—Job xxiii., 
13. ‘What if God, willing to show His wrath 
and to make His power known, endureth with 
much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted 
to destruction ?”—Rom. ix., 22. ‘‘Who can 
stand before His indignation ? who can abide in 
the fierceness of Hisanger? His fury is poured 
out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by 
Him.”—Nah. 1, 6. Such men as Calvin and 
Edwards necessarily shaped their notion of 
God to the narrow psychology by which they 
expounded the spiritual world to themselves. 
Allied to these notions which enter into our 
construction of character are those which find 
expression in government. Civil government, 
the most obvious type of authority, may be 
brought forward as explanatory of the divine 
government, “ Doth God pervert judgment, or 
doth the Almighty pervert justice ?”—Job viii, 
3. Especially has this notion of justice been 
misleading. It has been regarded as an abso- 
lute quality, a supreme impulse, which de- 
mands satisfaction at all hazards. Men have 
proceeded to construct the government of God 
in harmony with this notion, and have embar- 
rassed by means of it all the processes of for- 
giveness and love. Only the remainder of 


The Goodness of God. on 


action, after the impulses of sovereignty and 
justice have been gratified, have been con- 
ceded to love. The exigencies of the divine 
government — fanciful exigencies because in- 
terpreted on a limited human model — must be 
met, whatever befalls the divine tenderness and 
redemptive grace, 

The confusion of ideas incident to this ill- 
analyzed moral experience has held men, back 
from completing the notion of divine goodness, 
which has, none the less, been pushed into the 
foreground. “The Lordis gracious and full of 
compassion, slow to anger and of great mercy. 
The Lord is good to all, and His tender mer- 
cies are over all His works.”—Ps, cxlv., 9. 
“How excellent is Thy loving-kindness, O 
Lord ; therefore the children of men put their 
trust under the shadow of Thy wings.”—Ps. 
Sey Ley 

Not till the Epistles of John do we find the 
goodness of God given as an unqualified and 
ruling principle. ‘“ Beloved, let us love one 
another: for love is of God; and every one 

that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. 
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for 
God is love.” ‘‘ We have known and believed 
the love that God hath to us. God is love; 


24 The Conception of God. 


and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, 
and God in him.” ‘There is no fear in love; 
but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear 
hath torment. He that feareth is not made 
perfect in love.’—1 Jno. iv; 7, 8, 16, 18. 
Here is a conception of God which in its con 
sistency and fulness was new. The words of 
our Lord, though they are never of the same 
explicit, dogmatic character, involve a similar 
idea of God to that contained in the words of 
the beloved disciple. The introductory words 
of our Lord’s prayer, ‘‘ Our Father which art 
in heaven,” fling us at once, under the image 
of goodness most familiar to us, on the good- 
ness of God. Christ teaches us that this 
watchful goodness extends to all things. The 
very hairs of our head are all numbered. 

The position which Christ gave to the two 
-great commandments contains the same con- 
clusion in a more comprehensive form. We 
cannot love God with all the heart and soul and 
mind except as He Himself calls out this love ; 
nor can we love our neighbor as ourselves 
otherwise than in recognition of the universal 
law of love. The parable of the prodigal son 
takes from the conception of God any sense of 
severity or of retribution, and represents Him 


Love Supreme. 25 


as ever waiting for us with open, parental 
arms. 

These concrete images find abstract expres- 
sion in the assertion, ‘‘ God is love”; a concep- 
tion that was still struggling with conflicting 
ideas as indicated by the affirmation of the 
writer of Hebrews: ‘For our God is a con- 
suming fire.’—(Heb. xii., 29) ; or by the words 
of St. Paul when he puts down all criticism of 
God’s ways by the inquiry, ‘‘Who art thou 
that answerest against God ?”—Rom. ix., 20. 

We understand by the assertion that God is 
‘love, that love, in the character of God, rules 
and sets in order all other impulses ; that there 
‘are no moral impulses which, from the nature 
of the case or in fact, are in conflict with love. 
If there is anything in the righteousness of 
God which is inconsistent with this predomi- 
nating love, then it could not be said that 
God is love. 

There can be no demand of, justice going 
before and superior to the demand of hoes 
| There can be no eternal punishment unless it 
}can be shown that that punishment in some 
, way fulfills itself in love. Righteousness and 
wisdom may define the methods to be pursued 
by love, but in so doing they only express 


26 The Conception of God. 


love. They put no limits upon it. This view 
is consistent with either of the two prevalent 
ethical theories. We may make happiness the 
controlling element in the moral law, or we 
may accept a moral law grounded in reason 
and ultimately issuing in happiness ; in either 
case the entire movement of the world is to- 
ward the welfare of men. God's love gathers 
quality, strength, and expression in every ful- 
fillment of ethical law. 

Love implies a supreme regard for the well- 
being of those who are its object. It finds no 
difficulty in putting this impulse foremost. 
It accepts love as the primary law of a spiritual 
universe, If love is possible, then all con- 
flicts can be overcome, and spiritual life every- 
where be put in harmony with itself. There 
is no constitutional discrepancy of interests or 
of aims between men. The strength of all is 
found in the welfare of each. If this love is 
not possible, then there is no possible harmony 
in the spiritual world, and whatever peace is 
secured must be reached by crushing inferior 
claims under superior ones, weaker persons 
under stronger persons. 

The law of love must not only flow out of 
the rational nature of God, it must find its 


God's Love the Source of Love. 27 


germinant power in that nature. We shall 
love Him because He has first loved us; and 
love our fellow-men because of the possibility . 
of the extension of love in the world in fulfill- 
ment of His purpose. The creative thought 
will run before and guide our love. If the 
world, as a spiritual product, gives no color to 
the law of love ; if the collidings of appetite, 
passion, and desire are endless ; if they look to 
no unity and resolve themselves into no light, 
_then we lack the basis of a Kingdom of 
Heaven, and have no proof of a Heavenly 
King. 

As long as men believed in gods many, 
merciful or vengeful, the character of any 
deity had little to do with a sense of reality. 
Indeed this sense could be enhanced by fear 
as readily as by love, since it was a question 
of the emotions. When we come to deal with 
the spiritual world by a rational rendering of 
the physical world, by a study of its inner 
force and drift, any lack of graciousness in 
purpose or of coherence in plan immediately 
obscures our sense of a Spiritual Presence. 
The heavens are covered with clouds, and we 
see nothing beyond the events, toward and 
untoward, by which we are enclosed. Any 


28 The Conception of God. 


revelation, therefore, of the love of God is a 
parting of the mist, an opening up of the deep 
blue beyond, a disclosure of our true position 
in the infinitely comprehensive movement of 
‘which we are a part. Our sense of the being 
/of God must more and more depend on our 
. sense of His goodness. The interpreting idea 
of the spiritual universe is this law of love, 
and in its light the life of God is disclosed and 
His personality gathered up. Without it, con- 
fusion still reigns in what should be the high- 
est realm of order. Very little conviction can 
gather about the being of a God struck with 
the worst form of weakness, that of indiffer- 
ence to the general welfare; or with the worst 
form of incapacity, the incapacity to control 
‘evil. The supreme law of the spiritual world 
is love ; one who sees this can give no accept- 
ance to the assertion of a Supreme Reason in 
whose nature this impulse is not a ruling ele- 
-ment. Our best light must be a portion of 
His light, our clearest vision a reflection of His 
vision. Those processes of thought which are 
a disclosure of the ultimate force of the spirit- 
ual world must also be a disclosure of the na- 
ture of God. We see the one in the other. 
Any want of parallelism between the two, any 


Love Essential to Belief in God. 29 


confusion in either, weakens the vision of 
faith. If the love of God were reduced or 
lost, it would be impossible to gather up the 
dissolving attributes of a holy personality in 
such a way as to make them appeal to reason. 
[The key of the world is its spiritual realm, 
‘the key of the spiritual realm is love, and this 
‘love must abide in the mind of God. Not 
otherwise do we reach the harmony of reason. 
The explanation of the world by the imma- 
nence of a pure spirit is rational in the meas- 
ure in which that spirit is pure; and in the 
measure in which the world expresses that 
purity. Any deficiency on either side is con- 
fusion and disturbance of thought. 

We can see and feel the necessity of good- 
ness in the divine character only when we 
have so far fathomed the ethical laws of the 
world as thoroughly to understand that the 
commandments of love are the first and second 
commandments, and that obedience to them 
truly inheres in the nature of God and of man. 
This is a long lesson, and we acquire it very 
slowly. When we have settled this point, that 
the drift of the spiritual universe is toward 
love, we shall allow nothing in our philoso- 
phy of life to interfere with it; and we shall 


30 The Conception of God. 


interpret God’s nature and purposes by it. In 
that stage of thought, to deny perfect good- 
ness to God is to deny His moral supremacy, 
is to deny His being. God must not only be 
accepted as love, but as pressing into nonentity 
all that is not love. As reason reveals itself 
it will always be in this light of love. As, 
therefore, our knowledge of the nature of love 
and of its relations to human life expands, our 
conception of God undergoes change. It thus 
becomes a supreme question whether the world 
as a fact justifies this assertion of the divine 
goodness ; whether, unable to affirm any other 
God, we can affirm this God. 


Teale lige DT 


THE NATURE OF GOD'S GOODNESS. 


The safety and sanity of life consist in keeping in 
mind the higher ends and laws of our existence. For 
man is not only to know, but to do and to achieve. 
Strange, is it not, that man should not be content with 
what he sees; that he should turn his back on the 
known and familiar in search of something better ; that 
he should stake his life sometimes on a hope or dream of 
his mind? Yet this, too, belongs to man: it is the ideal 
ends of human life calling in him for their accomplish- 
ment; and he, simple and loyal, does not fail to hear. 
—W. M. Satter, Ethics and Religion, p. 75. 


32 


Peek Vill: 


THE NATURE OF GOD'S GOODNESS. 


ee is an impulse which can complete it- 

self only as it is associated with the most 
comprehensive wisdom. There must be, in 
connection with its expression, an adequate 
choice of ends and a nice adaptation of means 
to their accomplishment. The conferring of 
happiness successfully implies a complete 
knowledge of the being on whom it is be- 
stowed, and of the conditions suitable to his 
farther development. 

There is no sufficient proof that the im- 


‘mediate purpose of the world is to bestow 
pleasure, to play constantly and agreeably on 
a sensitive organism. Such a view greatly 
reduces, if it does not wholly exclude, the 


spiritual problem. We are to judge the good- 


“ness of God in connection with the ultimate 


aim of His government, and in connection 

with the means by which it is pursued. If we 

can form no idea of the end in view in the 
33 


34 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


world, we can pronounce no judgment on 
the feeling which its events express. 

The purpose of the world seems to be a de. 
velopment in man of a spiritual nature,— the 
perception of spiritual facts and a spontaneous 
response to them. This means that the possi- 
' bilities of good-will, the inner law of a Kingdom 
of Heaven, are being more and more disclosed 
to him, and are becoming a part of his spiritual 
consciousness. We gather this purpose from 
the trend of events: slow, vacillating, and ob- 
scure, but on the whole undeniable. The act- 
ual evolution of the world has been and is a 
spiritual one. The law of love is becoming 
more clearly revealed and more widely ac- 
cepted. Institutions like the family, the 
Church, the State, and society are made to rest 
more distinctly uponit. No other equilibrium 
in life remains permanent; no other solution 
of its problems gains acceptance. All con- 
struction in society which rests on violence, or 
on self-interest simply, sooner or later gives 
way and throws us back on a better, a higher 
solution of the terms of settlement. The law 
of the spiritual world, apprehended so long 
ago, still remains good: “I will overturn, 
overturn, Overturn it; and it shall be no more 


Spiritual Life. 35 


until he come whose right it is; and I will give 
it him.” 

This spiritual life is also shown to be the 
purpose of the world because it is the ideal 
ever returning in clear light to the minds of 
men; that which the wisest and the best 
promise to themselves and to others. This 
vision of spiritual fellowship is more than a 
morning star; it itself is the light and will 
grow into the light that shall force back the 


clouds and fulfill its own promise. If that 
which is fittest survives in the physical world, 


still more must that which is best conquer in 


the spiritual world. It works there with a 


double force: its mastery over events, and its 
mastery over the thoughts of men. The high- 
est thing we can conceive lies most directly, as 
an interpreting idea, between us and God, 
and is necessarily the centre of spiritual move- 
ment. We shall discuss the goodness of God 
under this supposition, that the creative pro- 
cess now going forward is a process of spiritual 
life. 

The question then becomes whether the 
discipline of life is well fitted to unfold these 
higher powers, to beget a clear consciousness 
of good, to sift the good from the evil, the 


36 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


true from the false, and to put the impulses 
and the gains of life on the side of righteous- 
ness. The things we are to secure are 
apprehension, concurrence, joy, abiding as 
ever-renewed and growing factors in the soul 
itself. The excellency of the attainment, if it 
can be attained, the adequacy of this end, we 
need not pause to affirm. The only doubt that 
can linger in our minds pertains to the absolute 
fitness of the means by which these results are 
‘sought. The purpose itself is so comprehen- 
sive, adequate, and supreme as to justify any 
/means that are involved in its fulfillment. 

It is a slow process by which all the parts 
of our infinitely complex spiritual life enter, 
one after another, the region of consciousness, 
and are there shaped into masterful character. 
A physical organization that is slowly built 
into strength and symmetry under the actions 
and reactions of its environment is a simple 
product when contrasted with the physical, the 
intellectual, the social life which attends on 
human development. 

There is, first, a protracted integration of 
the physical and the spiritual powers by which 
the body comes to sustain the spirit, and the 
spirit to gain a visible, suitable presence in the 


The Spiritual Man. 37 


body. Not only does the spiritual man, when 
fittingly endowed with physical life, transcend 
)all other products, he so far transcends them as 
‘to be quite of his own order—such a miracle 
_of workmanship as to be the true exponent of 
(the whole world. There is nothing which is 
associated with him in power save the diversi- 
fied family into which he is organized and the 
propagating force of the race of which he is an 
expression. The slowly accumulated physical 
and spiritual potentialities which are combined 
in a proximately perfect man, which have 
grown up together and completed each other 
by insensible increments through many gener- 
ations, whose provoking causes and occasions 
have been found in the entire physical and 
spiritual worlds, mark him as the ripening 
fruit of all evolution. Not only are all phases 
of physical life completed in him, every step 
of intellectual development, every spiritual 
product reached in the painful unfolding of 
families, communities, and nations, are present 
in him, held at length as an organic tendency, 
a communal instinct, anda personal conviction. 
The double conversion of wants into convic- 
tions, and of convictions into spiritual im- 
pulses ; of necessities into achievements and of 


38 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


achievements into inherited powers; this con- 
stant play of the physical life upon the conscious 
life, and of the conscious life back upon the 
physical life; the perpetual transfer of all vir- 
tues won by the individual or by the race into 
the ever-broadening stream of human life, is 
something which, if at any one moment it re- 
mains intangible and invisible, is like the mo- 
tion of the heavenly bodies, a perennial factor 
in all creative processes. So to integrate, 
under an orderly evolution, the physical and 
the spiritual worlds that they shall become in- 
separable parts of one thing, and unite in 
growing ministrations to the conscious and the 
unconscious elements of life, is to lay the 
foundations of the Kingdom of Heaven and 
to build thereon. 

One of the most influential developments 
among men was that of Greece, uniting, under 
their own inherent tendencies, intellectual ac- 
tivity and physical strength. From that time 
on the embodiment of these two endowments, 
mental power and physical beauty, has been an 
ideal conception among men, and _ has set in 
motion many forms of discipline for its realiza- 
tion. This partial achievement of the Greek 
was one stadium in the march of human 


The Physical and the Spiritual. 39 


history. We have so to build the humane pur- 
pose on brutal strength, so to ripen the kindly 
out of the cruel impulse, that our lives shall be 
as the plant in its victories. For every root it 
thrusts downward into darkness it sends a 
branch upward into light ; all that it gathers 
beneath it expands above as foliage, flower, 
and fruit. 


“Let us not always say 
‘Spite of this flesh to-day 
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!’ 
As the bird wings and sings, 
Let us cry ‘ All good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps 
SOU ea 


This integration of the physical and the 
spiritual, the earthly and the heavenly life, pro- 
ceeds but slowly and with many errors. An 
early cry of the spirit has been that of St. Paul: 
‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death?” But a feeling of this kind leads at once 
toa misapprehension of the problem, and of the 
method, of redemption. James regarded the 
friendship of the world as enmity with God.— 
James iv., 4-11. John says of the world, “It 
passeth away with the lust thereof.”—1 John ii., 


* Robert Browning, Radéi ben Ezra. 


40 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


17. Paul exhorts us not to make provision for 
the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof,—Rom. XliL., 
14. “God forbid that I should glory save in 
the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom 
the world is crucified unto me and I unto the 
world.”—Gal. vi., 14. 

The spiritual life received such an impulse 
forward in the words of Christ, that the volun- 
tary powers were greatly quickened, and his 
early disciples were ready to carry the Kingdom 
of Heaven by storm. They had small patience 
for anything that seemed to stand in the way 
of it, and were led to regard things as obstacles 
which were really of the nature, first of diffi- 
culties, then of aids. In this spirit they com- 
menced their associate religious life with a 
partial community of goods, and maintained it 
till its inherent embarrassments threw them 
back into the ordinary channels of social devel- 
opment. Paul, when he enforces chastity on 
the ground that our bodies are the temples of 
God, involves the true principle of the in- 
separable interdependence of body and mind. 

The Old Testament, especially in the Psalms, 
shows a sounder apprehension than that which 
characterized the early Christians of the rela- 
tion of physical conditions toa healthy spiritual 


The Physical and the Spiritual. 41 


life. ‘‘ Let the beauty of the Lord our God be 
upon us. —Ps. xc.,17. “Strength and beauty 
are in His sanctuary.’”—Ps. xcvi., 6. ‘That our 
sons may be as plants grown up in their youth ; 
that our daughters may be as a corner-stone 
polished after the similitude of a palace; that 
our garners may be full, affording all manner 
of store ; that our sheep may bring forth thou- 
sands and tens of thousands in our streets ; 
that our oxen may be strong to labor; that 
there be no breaking in nor going out; that 
there be no complaining in our streets. 
Happy is that people that is in such a case; 
yea, happy is that people whose God is the 
Lord.” Ps. exliv.,r2-15. The rule of righteous- 
ness, as imaged by Isaiah, was one of universal 
peace. “ They shall not hurt nor destroy in all 
My holy mountain.”——Is. xi.,9. Paul, on the 
other hand, in the presence of great spiritual 
issues seems disposed to minimize and push 
aside earthly relations. ‘The time is short; it 
remaineth that both they that have wives be as 
though they had none; and they that weep, 
as though they wept not; and they that re- 
joice, as though they rejoiced not ; and they 
that buy, as though they possessed not ; and 
they that use this world, as not abusing it, for 


42 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


the fashion of this world passeth away.’ —I 
Cor. vii., 29-31. 

We know how rapidly the separation of the 
spiritual life from the physical and social life 
with which it was associated led to mischief, 
till repulsive squalor and the fanaticism of self- 
torture brought thorns and thistles in the vine- 
yard of God in place’of fruits. Though it is 
not necessary to suppose that this mistake in 
method made the redemptive process abortive, 
it certainly embarrassed and delayed it for 
centuries. Asceticism became an eddy in the 
stream, driven indeed by the forward flow, but 
itself unfruitful of progress. 

How very different is the really divine 
movement by which the physical forces of the 
world, whether in the body of man, or in inter- 
play with it, unite with its spiritual forces in 
an increasing expression of the creative pur- 
pose! A vital evolution is thus achieved in 
which the conscious and voluntary powers are 
ever taking a larger part. The spiritual is 
constantly laying surer foundations for itself 
in the sensuous world, and so prepares for itself 
a more perfect fulfillment of its own purposes. 

It is a slow process by which we are first 
led to conceive of the physical world as our 


The Physical and the Spiritual. 43 


medium upward, and later led to that organic 
growth in it and with it by which it becomes 
a daily embodiment of our beneficent powers. 
Nowhere else do we more immediately meet 
God as working with us, or better understand 
the practical quality and scope of our labors. 
We drop out of the heaven of vague desires 
and enter into the fruition of reasonable hopes. 
The petition that the will of God may be done 
in earth as it is in heaven means this bending 
of all things in lines of obedience to a living, 
pervasive spiritual impulse, which reaches deep 
for its sources of strength only that it may 
spread high and wide in the sunlight of divine 
favor. 

The world is not something to be left be- 
hind and forgotten by spirits now happily dis- 
embodied, but is the many-wheeled vehicle in 
which we are taken up in our progress heaven- 
ward. Thus to integrate ourselves day by day 
with God’s creative work, to understand and 
rejoice in that work, to become its most sig- 
nificant and explanatory portion, to make what 
was simply good without us very good by 
means of us,—this is to gain our first vic- 
tory with the first weapon put in our hands, 
this is to achieve a good at once physical and 


44 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


spiritual, this is to have the gift of God in 
us as well as with us. 

We thus win what are sometimes contempt- 
uously called natural virtues—virtues which, 
in their deepest signification, mean pure affec- 
tions incorporated in a structure suitable to 
them. The natural virtue is virtue freed of 
its heat and passion, and made the peaceful 
movement of the mind in its daily ongoing. 
This concurrence of temperament, physical 
tone, and spiritual temper in one rational life, 
this strict subservience of appetites and pas- 
sions to the organic structure of which they 
form a part, is the highest harmony known 
to men, and one toward which all events are 
/pushing. The difference between the most 
perfect specimen of the most perfect race and 
the least perfect example of the least perfect 
race lays down for us a measuring unit in 
this growth of men heavenward. 

It is quite possible that in our earlier ap- 
prehension and pursuit of this complex spiritual 
well-being, our Christianity may gain in muscle 
faster than in the mind of the Master. This 
is only another example of a universal experi- 
ence. Great truths are pursued and attained 
in a rhythmic way, with an ebb and flow of 


The Physical and the Spiritual. 45 


effort. We may be pouring more air into 
the glowing furnaces of a gunboat, when we 
should be trimming the sails of a merchant- 
man to the steady trade-winds that bear her 
gaily forward on her beneficent errands. 

The two elements, physical and spiritual, 
must necessarily grow together and interlace 
along the lines of their common expansion. 
A certain concurrence of the two is inevitable, 
and their complete harmony in the highest 
life is the ultimate issue of all evolution, physi- 
cal and spiritual. This is the true deliverance 
from the body of this death, which our physi- 
cal structure seems to be to the impatient 
spirit which has suddenly projected itself for- 
ward in the line of growth. Such a soul, far 
on in the enemy’s territory, needs to pause and 
to fortify the position it has won. The King- 
dom of Heaven is the product of many gen- 
erations of purified life. A life that thus 
develops itself within itself, that compacts 
itself by itself, gains, at the same time, a 
growing mastery of the physical forces that 
enclose it. To grow in grace thus means to 
grow in all the conditions of a wholesome ex- 
perience, means a complete revelation of the 
divine mind in broad daylight, means a leisurely 


46 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


walk with God in the garden of God for the 
ends of its cultivation. 

A second integration, which accompanies 
and follows this integration of mind and body, is 
that which takes place between our intellectual 
and our ethical or spiritual impulses. The term 
which lies midway between intellectual activity, 
as a simple adaptation of means to ends, and 
spiritual life, nourishing itself by a wide and 
penetrative rendering of the world in its ulti- 
mate address to the affections, is the ethical 
law. This law is accepted and established 
within the mind itself for its own highest 
unfolding. 

Men have great trouble in uniting sensuous 
and spiritual welfare with each other, and lay- 
ing down harmonious boundaries between 
them. It cannot be done otherwise than 
through ethical law, that inner law of action 
by which we grow up into all the higher con- 
ceptions of the spiritual life and call out its 
self-rewardful impulses. 

Few discussions in practical life or in phi- 
losophy have been more pertinaciously pursued 
than that involved in the determination of the 
nature of ethical law, and in the crystallization 
of our activities about it. The ground so 


The Intellectual and the Ethical. 47 


often fought over, of necessity and of liberty, 
the alleged victories of determinism at once 
made nugatory by the ever-returning tide of 
human activity,—the chiselled rock beginning 
at once to show lichen and moss,—involves, as 
the gist of the contention, the existence of an 
ethical law. The presence of such a law im- 
plies and carries with it the power of obedi- 
ence. Philosophy is compelled, however 
often it may stumble and fall, to bring forward 
anew this notion of liberty, building up the 
structure of reason on the ethical framework 
of reason. Spiritual life will accept no other 
solution. 

In the practical development of life, men 
are constantly thrusting back, in fierce aver- 
sion, this and that phase of ethical law as it 
appears above the intellectual horizon, and 
passing over those who urge it to the cate- 
gory of meddlers and imbeciles. 
| “Not that there is to-day any lack of theologians and 
philanthropists to protest against it (the right of the strong- 

/ est). To them we owe the numberless volumes in which 
they appeal, in eloquent phrases, to right and to justice, 
' a kind of sovereign divinities who direct the world from 
the depth of the skies. But the facts have always given 


the lie to their vain phraseology. These facts tell us that 
| right exists only where it possesses the necessary strength 


48 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


/ to make itself respected. We cannot say that might is 
. greater than right, for might and right are identical.” * 

This sentiment is not often blurted out in 
this crude and offensive form, but it is present 
in every social struggle, and lies as a shadow 
of darkness on the skirts of every historic 
landscape. Few as yet accept the supreme 
force of ethical law, a law that renews itself 
after every defeat in its entire claims. Men 
grant, in moments. of insight, the inextin- 
guishable nature of truth, but they do not see 
(that this assertion means no more than the 
truism, ‘‘ What is is,” except as truth discloses 
lines of action and so resolves itself into the 
eternal laws of conduct. This endless conflict 
does not matter; it drives back no moral im- 
pulse ; it simply prepares the way of victory. 
Men may have declared fora century that there 
is no moral element involved in slavery which 
must be reckoned with; yet at the end of the 
century peals out the assertion of an irrepress- 
ible conflict, and the whole fabric of force 
crumbles in the dust. 

All the developments of society are sim- 
ply an integration of ethical law, normal to 
man’s higher constitution, with the physical 

* Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, p. 327. 


Religious Feeling and Ethical Law. 49 


laws which inhere in him as an appetitive, 
refined, sagacious brute. 

One might suppose that men would find 
little difficulty in reconciling ethical law and 
religious feeling, being, as they are, the intel- 
lectual and emotional sides of our spiritual 
life ; yet this has not been the case. Christian 
faith, as voiced in its expositors, has often in- 
stituted a kind of antagonism between moral- 
ity and religion, and has spoken lightly of 
what has been termed mere morality. If we 
are at liberty to speak of mere morality, we 
are at liberty to speak of mere religion ; of 
mere body and mere mind; till our disjected 
members all perish together. Ethics as much 
demands keen spiritual insight, and the senti- 
ments incident to it, as does any distinctively 

{religious doctrine. There is no revelation 
‘of God more Spiritual, more commanding, 
/more comforting, than that of ethical law. It 
lis the most direct, pervasive, and conspicuous 
expression of the Divine Reason. Religious 
feeling that is not nourished by ethical law 
lacks wisdom and strength. Ethical law that 
does not call forth profound personal sympa- 
thies is robbed of its own proper fruit. Mor- 


ality cannot be assigned a position subordinate 
4 


50 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


to faith, for it is of its very substance, its most 
rational and substantial element. 

A still greater failure to unite the two as 
parts of one system has been seen in the ease 
with which the government of God has been 
made to accept principles which rest on no 
ethical basis. Even the very notion of ethi- 
cal law has been planted, notin eternal reason 
but in infinite power. Here we have Le Bon 
and Paul catching at the same idea. Paul 
puts down his adversary with the sharp in- 
quiry, ‘“Who art thou that answerest against 
God?” Yet Reason is infinitely open to all in- 
quiry and placable to all insight. The severe 
punishments referred to God have been justi- 
fied as expressions of His will, or defended 
on grounds quite aside from the ethical train- 
ing involved in them. The penitence and the 
forgiveness which so constantly assuage trans- 
gression among men have been conceded only 
a limited use between men and God. The 
government of God has not been allowed to 
stand on terms of perfect sympathy with the 
ethical construction of the world. 

Because of this reduction of the part played 
by the moral element in human discipline, men 
were less able to unite natural law and spiritual 


Natural Law and Ethical Law. 51 


law in one harmonious whole. Natural law 
and ethical law offered little restraint or guid- 
ance to the divine method. Says Cowper, 
whose mind was saturated with current theol- 
ogy: “I know that God is not governed by 
secondary causes in any of His operations, and 
that, on the contrary, they are all so many 
agents in His hand, which strike only where 
He bids them.” * He was ready, therefore, to 
charge himself with some imbecility of faith, be- 
cause he was disposed to trace a periodical 
return in the malady under which he suffered. 
) At the present time we are at the Opposite 
extreme of the arc of vibration, and find great 
‘difficulty in admitting any direct spiritual force 
in the government of God. That government 
‘is identified with natural law, and is allowed in 
no way to transcend it. The spirit struggles 
‘in vain not to be stripped of every inner gar- 
ment of faith, and not to be left naked, subject 
to all the cruel pelting of the physical world. 
Can any adjustment be less spiritually fitting 
than this: man alone with things, with no spir- 
itual resource or spiritual response, and that in 
a world in which every unfledged bird is born 
in a nest ! 


* Cowper’s Letters, p. 258. 


52. The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


When we come to the ultimate problem of 
the relation of the physical and the spiritual to 
each other in the government of God, we seem 
to forget at once the clue by which we should 
approach it. If we can hold fast to the integ- 
rity of the mind, the validity of its powers, girt 
about as it is with physical causes, we should 
be able to hold fast to the spiritual integrity of 
God, even though a world of natural forces is 
His constant medium of revelation—the atmo- 
sphere through which the light plays. If the 
human mind can melt into its physical agents, 
—like the flake of snow in the water—and yet 
not become one with them, certainly God may 
preserve His personal spiritual presence in a 
world of His own creation. It is time that we 
ceased to relieve our weariness by standing, 
first on one foot and then on the other, and 
moved forward with that marvelous concur- 
rence of things both physical and spiritual 
which makes us to be rational creatures. 

The ethical law may be said to be that addi- 
tional element which enables us to unite matter 
and mind with each other, and to organize our 
sensuous and spiritual activities under the dis- 
cipline of that commanding idea of duty by 
means of which both are defined and fulfilled. 


Ethical Integration. 53 


Thus the beating of the spiritual pulse is ever 
determining the rhythm of forces with which the 
‘entire life goes forward. No union can pos- 
sibly transcend in creative power, in beauty, in 
joy, this union, under ethical law, of our sensu- 
_ ous experiences and spiritual affiliations. It is 
an integration, which, like that of clouds in 
rapid atmospheric changes, constantly takes on 
fresh disclosures of the marvelously facile ele- 
ments with which we have to do. The ethical 
and spiritual man needs to be taught, like the 
unethical and unspiritual man, that his concep- 
tions are by no means ultimate ; that he claims 
for them in their inadequate and transitional 
forms an authority which does not belong to 
them, and that these intangible terms of con- 
duct must declare and establish themselves in 
the growth of tangible things. The spiritual 
world is a creation, and in each of its stages we 
must be able to pronounce it good; and in its 
completion, very good. 
! In this ethical integration lies a chief disci- 
pline of the world. We evolve the ethical 
law from accumulated experience, individual 
and collective; we then bring it back to that 
experience for reciprocal correction. Thus 
Ethics passes into civil law, and civil law 


54 [The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


sobers and widens men’s thoughts, till duty be- 
comes the substance of social life. Papinian was 
a great civicist because of marvelous ethical 
insight. Our religious faith gains wisdom and 
practical guidance by virtue of ethical disclo- 
sures ; and what we first conceive as religious 
obligation, in more or less perverted and pain- 
ful forms, by virtue of the ethical insights and 
spiritual affections called out in connection 
with it, becomes, at length, the substance of 
spiritual strength. Life is made reasonable, 
self-contained, harmonious, and free by the 
growing revelations of our moral nature. 
What a masterful position falls tous! On 
the physical side, notwithstanding our physical 
weakness, we are neither overborne nor cast 
aside by the tremendous powers which enclose 
us. If we abide in ethical strength among 
ourselves, we can put upon them widely our 
purposes. On the Spiritual side, we are in the 
focus of light. All revelations gather in us, 
all lines of creative power, building up the 
Kingdom of Heaven, go forth from us, buoy 
up our activities and bear forward our hopes. 
The doctrine of immortality rests wholly on 
the force of the ethical law. Not only is there 


no sufficient argument to be derived from the 


Che 4 Aeore Lche Ax OO Vie Cegd 2: Cryrollan 
eof Wr ore dae Lea ch Nia ae F 


Immortality. 55 


physical world for immortality, its implications 

‘lie all in the Opposite direction. It is the 

unfulfilled moral law, the germinant powers 

/of our ethical being, that push into the 

future with a hope and with a claim that 

_we can lay at the foot of the throne of God— 

One who loves righteousness and nourishes 

jit in the world. Faith pre-eminently lays 

hold of the inherent vigor of ethical law, 

_and stands by it in noble fidelity to its own 
highest nature. As the mathematician casts 
his formule into limitless space, and predicts 
this and that in the movement of heavenly 
bodies, so does the spirit, strong in the co- 
herence of its conceptions, thrust them forward 
as the adequate basis of the divine plan — of 

_ everlasting life. 

_ This concurrent training of the intellectual 
perceptions and of the ethical sensibilities is 
constant and comprehensive. The world is 
hardly more of a school for our thoughts than 
for the feelings which unite us to each other. 
Every man’s experience offers him his own 
problems, and these problems run at once 
into those of his neighbor and those of the col- 
lective social life. They are also problems that 
are held fast and forced to a solution by the 


56 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


lines of action embraced in them. They are like 
the fibrous, interlaced roots of a plant, spread- 
ing over the whole ground subject to it, and 
maintained in constant activity by its entire 
life. , 

y~ The inquiry into ethical phenomena is 
equally empirical and intuitive. | While each 
man holds a torch in his hand, he explores by 
means of it the spiritually obscure events of his 
own life. If he sees to any purpose, these are 
the things which he sees. If the power to ap- 
prehend lies at the bottom of all investigation, 
the investigation itself is directed to the nature 
and fruits of action as presented in human 
society. A full, vigorous mastery of the events 
of the spiritual world is the wisdom that issues 
in conduct and character. 

Nor is it possible to deny that such a con- 
current evolution of our intellectual and ethical 
thinking isin progress. It is not a question of 
theory so much as of observation. Moral con- 
victions, propounded, improved, readapted in 
many ways to the wants of men, as for the mo- 
ment apprehended, constitute the substance of 
customs, of social disputations and of judicial 
decisions. Take such a growth as that of 
common law, or such a budding up within it as 


Ethical Integration a Fact. 57 


that of equity, to give it more perfect adapta- 
tion ; or such a development as that of inter- 
national law, a tardy application of primary 
principles of Ethics to the relation of States to 
each other ; or the ways in which a Constitution 
like our own, fitted in the beginning by those 
who framed it, as they were best able, to the 
wants of men, is constantly rediscussed and 
readjusted, that it may better meet the change- 
able tone of events; and we see at once that 
the ethical integration of men’s thoughts has 
already gone far and is to go much farther. It 
is an evolution as positive and plain as any 
that has taken place in the world’s history. 
The blindness of those who fail to see it, or the 
perversity of those who deny its significance, 
are only a part of the rubbish to be cleared 
away. 

The only possibility of social equilibrium 
lies in this ethical integration. Every point 
made is one of equilibrium. The opening of 
every new question arises from the lack of 
equilibrium. The ethical verdict is the verdict 
of reconciliation. With the same certainty 
with which physical forces adjust themselves 
to each other along the lines of least resistance 
do intellectual forces unite along the lines of 


58 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


ethical law. Indeed, this is the entire sig- 
nificance of ethical discussion, the union of 
all interests in personal and in general welfare. 
To deny the integrity of ethical evolution is to 
affirm the eternity of strife and confusion in 
the higher spiritual realm; is to resolve 
rational events into chaos. The entire reion 
of law so far in the physical world pleads for this 
harmonized movement of social events, this 
coming of a spiritual kingdom, the counter- 
part of the kingdoms beneath it. The whole 
accumulated momentum of the ever-growing 
idea of evolution is passing into this last, 
highest stage of activity. The integration of 
the diverse terms of our intellectual life under 
their own law of freedom is sure to proceed, 
under that one compelling certainty which has 
ruled from the beginning, no matter how many 
ages it may embrace. Nothing stands in its 
way but the confusion it is destined to over- 
come; nothing delays it but the magnitude of its 
own work; nothing hides it but the opaqueness 
which its own crystallizing forces are to cancel. 
This intellectual transparency must precede, 
and be the basis of, social construction. 

/ A third integration, proceeding with the 
two already given, is that of the individual 


Love as Progressive. 59 


}with the community, of communities with each 
‘other, of all classes and conditions of men in the 
one spiritual world which they make up,—fulfill- 
ing the most explicit and perfect image of St. 
Paul, ‘ We are all members one with another in 
thesame body.” The law of this integration is 
}contained in the two commandments of love. 
That these should so long have been present 
in the minds of men, evermore gaining clear- 
ness and comprehension, is a disclosure of the 
true goal of progress ; that they should have 
been conceived so inadequately, and obeyed 
so slightingly, shows how far off is that goal 
and how painful the road to it. The law of 
love has been like the sun seen through a 
thick mist; its position has been indicated, but 
its disk has been undefined and its heat cut 
off. Men say to themselves they see it, and 
yet in no way apprehend its glory. 

These two commandments indicate the road 
to be travelled; but immediate and adequate 
obedience is impossible. Men can neither fully 
see the requirements, nor feel their sanctions. 
Love lies between higher, purer, more peaceful 
spirits, and can only declare itself in its perfec- 
tion as a spiritual law, when the spirit itself finds 
it a spontaneous expression of its own impulses, 


60 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


The intellectual enlargements, the emotional 
corrections, the softened experiences, which 
attend on the development of the spirit are slow 
and painful, and leave it for long groping in a 
light insufficient for the ends of life. The day 
clears, but it clears lingeringly, for the mist is 
heavy. 

f This integration ‘of man with man is one 
which rules the civil, the commercial, and the 
social worlds. In the political world, it involves 
the reconciliation of individualism and collec. 
tivism; it looks to that construction of the 
State which shall make it at once the best me- 
dium of personal life and united life. It strug- 
gles to escape the barren, unstimulative method 
of socialism, in which the special powers of 
special members are largely superseded and 
lost,—and equally to escape that eagerness of 
private ambition which is as willing to sacrifice 
as to build up the common welfare. We are 
now suffering the disappointment of democratic 
institutions, and are disturbed by the disclosure 
of the new evils which come with them. It is 
because our integration of classes has been a 
formal, rather than a vital, one. Our civic re- 
lations must sink deeper into the minds and 
hearts of men, or, in the heat of human passion 


Prosperity and Love. 61 


fanned by prosperity, they become fibres of 
flax in the flame. We readily turn the gains 
of free government into losses, and have occa- 
sion to travel again and again, backward and 
forward, over the same road, till we have 
adapted our lives to it, and made it a highway 
of suitable and familiar thoughts. | This need 
of a deeper integration of the State is ever with 
us, and we are finding our way slowly into those 
truly vital experiences which suffice to expound 
its constitution to us, and to sustain us in car- 
rying it out. Again and again communities 
have reached prosperity, and been weakened 
and destroyed by its new conditions, They 
have come to the birth, and have not had 
power to bring forth. Not because prosperity 
is not prosperity, but because it calls for the 
support of correspondingly wide spiritual sen- 
timents, 

In company with this political integration, 
and closely allied to it, must proceed our union 
in economic effort. So central in the develop- 
ment of society is the acquisition of wealth, that 
we shall not prosper civilly nor socially till we 
have learned to harmonize our productive ac- 
tivities. Economics have been very perplex- 
ing, because, with a plain indication of certain 


62 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


fundamental laws, we have, in their fulfillment, 
suffered all the flaws of passion. No matter 
what profound and peaceful depths there may 
be in the ocean, its surface is constantly swept 
by storms. Our economic theories and our 
economic practice under them, have not been in 
harmony. Our expositions in action of prin- 
ciples has not expressed the true principle. 
Competition in Political Economy means a full 
and fair presentation of each man’s productive 
power as compared with that of his neighbor. 
It demands that there shall be no advantage 
conceded to any one to which he is not entitled 
from his relation simply to production. In 
practice we have made it mean a rough-and- 
tumble conflict in which we do our adversary 
what harm we can by any means at our disposal. 
‘There is little or no resemblance between what 
we often call competition and the competition 
/of Economics. Under the competition of Eco- 
“nomics the common welfare has sway, and if we 
drive a competitor from the field, we do it by a 
more efficient pursuit of this welfare. 

Political Economy treats of the laws which un- 
derlie the production of the general wealth, not 
of the processes by which one man may advance 
his own wealth at the expense of other men. 


Economic Law and Love. 63 


While the laws of Economics are not those 
of benevolence, they are not inconsistent with 
‘them. Both have reference to the general wel- 
| fare in different phases of it. We have also to 
|remember that these laws are operative, not in 
la vacuum, but in the one field of human action, 
‘side by side with all the complex laws of our 
social and spiritual life; and that they must suf- 
fer modification from skesin as well as bring mo- 
dification to them. The supreme law is not the 
largest returns with the least labor, but Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. These two 
‘laws do not stand in arbitrary suspension of each 
other, but are capable of integration in one 
Paueitous social product. This can be ac- 
complished only by a perpetual and kindly 
interplay of the two principles under an 
experience in which both are fully and wisely 
expounded. The law of love, well applied, will 
give the best conditions to production; and 
production, at its maximum power, will soften 
asperities, and give love its most facile and 
pleasurable flow. Self-interest, pushed forward 
into selfishness, begins at once to baffle itself 
and call out conditions which make wide and 
permanent and general prosperity impossible. 
The way is filled with pitfalls, and the victims 


64 The Naturet on God’s Goodness. 


become more and more numerous. On the 
other hand, the temper of good-will is stimulat- 
ing, organizing, harmonizing, and, when the 
wisdom which guides it is adequate to the task, 
it not only becomes a great creator of wealth, it 
makes safe and sure the connection between 
wealth and the pleasures it is intended to secure. 
We do not strike a concealed rock just as we 
enter harbor. This grand result can only be 
arrived at by a revelation which spreads slowly 
through all minds, and an integration which 
knits the whole together, part with part, in 
patient and well-ordered production. 

Social integration is at once cause and effect 
in connection with civic and economic con- 
struction. The three expound each other and 
thrive together, and all three depend for their 
strength on that spiritual fellowship in life 
which is nourished by a controlling sense of 
the wisdom and love of God as expressed in 
the world which encloses us. It is on this wide 
ocean that our several yachts speed hither and 
thither, go and return on all their errands of 
business and pleasure. 

There can be no magnitude givento our spirit- 
ual life, till by this integration of the many and 
the few, this spreading of life to its own proper 


Evolution and Love. 65 


bounds, we are made heirs with all and through 
all of the largeness of the wisdom and the love 
which sustain us all. The atmosphere of the 
mountains is always stimulating because it 
comes from far and goes afar. It is spiritually 
high places that enable us to abide in restful 
strength in the wide currents of our spiritual 
being. Inthe many are hidden the prodigality, 
universality and exhaustless quality of God’s 
love. The spiritual world is none too large for 
the life of any man in it. What limitations of 
thought and cramping throes of self-interest 
begin to take possession of a man when he 
falls off from our common humanity ! 

Many are ready to say that human nature is 
unchangeable ; that the integrations of which 
we speak are fanciful; that all things continue 
as they were. This assertion flatly contradicts 
not only faith, but that great plan of the world 
which we have come to call evolution. Our own 
historic period, brief as it is, is quite wide 
enough to bring us to another conclusion. 
Take the single fact that Roman civilization 
could subject to its luxurious indulgences, 
under the rigor of a pitiless servitude, Greek 
beauty, art, and ingenuity, while with us so 


alien a race as that of the negro, though 
5 


66 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


hated and despised, affronts our moral sense in 
the condition of slavery. 

What discipline could be more spiritual, 
could bring with it a deeper, more varied, 
more enlarged experience of the inner and 
the outer forces of the world than these ac- 
cumulative integrations, first of our lives with 
physical conditions, then of our ruder powers 
and our finer perceptions with each other, and 
still farther of our individual and our collective 
wants, the strength of each achieved in the 
strength of all! If we look at the results of 
our training in the world, results in knowledge, 
in action, and in character, they seem plainly 
to indicate that we are embraced in a scheme 
of spiritual development, most comprehen- 
sively fitted to its purpose. Knowledge breaks 
all limits; errors expose and correct them- 
selves; progress brings to us conditions of 
farther progress; the movement accelerates 
itself; corrections, qualifications, and expan- 
sions appear at every step. The goal seems 
remote and unattainable simply because it is 
so comprehensive and complete. That which 
remains to be known, done, or endured holds in 
it the seeds of farther life. The great achieve- 
ments which mark the path of the race are so 


Persistency of Discipline. 67 


many guide-boards to still more comprehen- 
sive ones. While the movement is largely one 
of knowledge and the mastery of physical re- 
sources, that which gives it smoothness and 
steadiness is moral quality — men coalescing 
in their efforts under one law. This is the 
deepest lesson of all; one to which, if we 
choose to neglect it, Heerory brings us back 
again and again. It is vain that we balk at 


ithe leap ; we are compelled to return to it. If 


men cannot learn, and learn to practise these 


jlessons of spiritual life in this world, they can 
learn them nowhere. They are present on 
the positive and on the negative side. The 


light and the darkness are alike terms of reve- 
lation. Our development is one of insight, 
faith, obedience, and we cannot TeOT Comte 
doubts, delays, and dangers that are its essen- 
tial conditions. He who is to subdue the 
world under the law of reason, fructify it un- 
der the law of love, must make light of the 
labors and sacrifices by which this is done. 
To endure hardship is of the substance of good 
soldiership. To master knowledge is of the 
nature of knowledge. 

Spiritual growth involves both insight and 
activity under it. The two are inseparable. 


68 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


‘Knowledge enlarges the field of choice, and 
choice widens in turn the opportunities and 
the occasions of knowledge. A scheme of 
things, therefore, which looks to spiritual 
power must furnish an unending discipline of 
thought, and of the constructive, social powers 
which work under it. _ Perplexities are a part 
of success so long’ as a way can be forced 
through them. There must be a constant 
widening out and clearing up of the common 
consciousness, like the dawn of day, till all the 
fields and boundaries of spiritual activity lie 
before us. We cannot, as mere children, be 
put in possession of large things; we must 
,grow into them, make them our own. How 
could there be a world which apportioned out 
to all sorts and conditions of men singly and 
in reference to each other, with more variety, 
urgency, and fitness of claims, things each day 
‘to be known and to be done, the knowing and 
the doing passing into higher forms of being ! 
How could harvests return more steadily into 
seed or seed into harvests! The cogency of 
the present system impresses us less favorably | 
because we weary of it, because it seems in- 
volved in the teasing nature of things, and not 
in the heart of God. It is involved in the 


Our Discipline Spiritual. 69 


constitution of things, and what we need to 
understand is that this untiring pressure of the 
‘world, by which we are pushed forward in the 
| ways of life, is the love of God. What every 
) child needs is to translate the requisition of 
, the father into his affection. The inevitable- 
ness, the rationality, and the goodness of 
things are one and the same. 

All our struggles, by virtue of our fellowship 
with each other in them, are made spiritual. 
Our profound choices and deep experiences 
lie between men. There is no astronomy 
without stars; no discipline of the spirit ex- 
cept in this common medium of spirits. The 
world is pre-eminently one of men, with whom 
we stand on slight and cogent, near and remote, 
superficial and profound, terms; men with 
whom we are making peace or war all the days 
of our lives. When we have learned to build 
together, we shall begin at once to build the 
Kingdom of Heaven. Our ever returning 
labor, as well as our ever returning prayer, is 
Thy Kingdom come. 

How each least, vexatious quarrel perplexes 
the spirit, forcing upon it new questions of 
right and wrong! How often we rehearse to 
ourselves the annoyance with its failures in 


S, 


70 The Nature of God’s Goodness. 


perception, in expression, or in feeling! Over 
against this little and light discipline, how does 
society in its unfolding raise new and difficult 
questions, whose answers turn on profounder 
principles! How are the minor and the major 
terms in enterprise and labor to be united with 
each other as they enter together on some 
wider field in social activity? How are the in- 
tangible terms in which wealth is now gaining 
such extended expression, its subtle and diver- 
sified credits and claims, to be made to bear 
their share of the common burdens, and to be 
harnessed, with their workaday fellows, into 
the common service ? 

It is this view of the world, as one which 
looks forward to spiritual construction, as one 
in the thick of the creative process, that dis- 
closes to us the counsels and the love of God. 
‘If we are to understand the goodness of God, 
we must understand it in connection with those 
comprehensive measures by which the growth 
and the unity of our spiritual life are being 
secured, and we are made the sons of God. 

We are also to bear in mind that these inte- 
grations must proceed in the individual, and in 
the common, consciousness. Otherwise they 
are not spiritual transformations. The physical 


Delay. 71 


terms involved in them cannot be hastened 
much beyond the concurrent spiritual ones. 
The question is one of what men think, feel, 
do, are. Time must be given in which all this 
inner life can be wrought out according to its 
own law. If there is great delay, it is delay 
incident to the dulness and perversity of men, 
and to the multitude who take part in this crea- 
tion. To the truly enlightened mind, this 
seething mass of life, issuing ever and anon in 
some higher spiritual product, is as sure in its 
methods and as full of hope as is to the smelter 
the union of the ingredients which he is melt- 
ing together to form the lenses of a telescope. 
The failures, the arduous and delicate work of 
shaping the final product, are only difficulties 
which enhance the value of the accomplish- 
ment and show how much skill and thought 
enter into it. 


PART V2 


OBJECTIONS TO GOD’S GOODNESS. 


73 


In common language we speak of a generation as 
something possessed of a kind of exact unity, with all its 
parts and members homogeneous. Yet very plainly it is 
not this. It is a whole, but awhole in astate of constant 
flux. Its factors and elements are eternally shifting. It 
is not one but many generations. Each of the seven ages 
is neighbor to all the rest. The column of the veterans 
is already staggering over into the last abyss, while the 
column of the newest recruits is forming with its name- 
less and uncounted hopes. To each its traditions, its 
tendency, its possibilities. Only a proportion of each in 
one society can have nerve enough to grasp the banner of 
a new truth, and endurance enough to bear it along 
rugged and untried ways.—John Morley, On Compromise, 
p. 208. 


74 


ieeeredk, ANY 


OBJECTIONS TO GOD’S GOODNESS. 


HILE most will assent to the force of the 
considerations now urged, not a few are 
embarrassed by conflicting impressions. Grant 
that the world is a nursery of spiritual life, is it 
not vexed by a climate unduly severe? Are 
there not many mishaps, if not misarrange- 
ments, which delay and baffle the end in view ? 
Is not the system slow, unyielding, exacting ? 
Some of these complaints are peevish and piti- 
ful; some arise from narrowness of intellectual 
view ; some from a reluctance to encounter 
great risks and endure heavy labors, even in 
behalf of adequate ends; and some from a lack 
of forecast of the divine plan and faith in it. 
The sensuous and unspiritual are willing to 
remain so. They would more quickly be left 
to inferior pleasures than be charged with the 
task of winning superior ones,—superior ones 
whose superiority they but dimly perceive. A 
process in which a thousand years are as one 
75 


76 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


| day is distasteful to man. He has been haunted 
by a millennium not far ahead, and which should 
come with sudden upheavals and signal aid. He 
has had no sufficient sense of the impossibility of 
such things in the vital world, still less of their 
impossibility in the spiritual world. This at 
least is to most men a world which can be 
changed offhand—a thing of volition. 

The imagination is especially impressed with 
the long, barren periods during which men have 
inhabited the earth— men shrivelled by polar 
cold, sodden by tropical heat, and everywhere 
grovelling. Though the fact may be in keep- | 
ing with the magnitude of things, it and this 
immensity are alike trying to our perplexed 
thoughts, to our indolent and ignorant aspira- 
tions. What are such remote things, even if 
they be true, worth, bringing to us endless suf- 
fering in their unfolding? The world does 
not receive the callow human young into a snug, 
warm nest, but into rigorous and unpromising 
nurture. One, straining his vision backward 
over the weary journeyings of the race, feels as 
when he gazes at midnight into the cold depths 
of the sky: the sense of greatness and remote- 
ness oppresses him. He searches no longer for 
the Infinite, but the finite. He would fain 


Without Hurry. iyi 


draw near to the things about him, and feel 
them drawing near to him. Man, with his ra- 
tional powers just opening to their proper uses, 
is always trembling between feelings and events 
too large or too little for him. 

It is not possible to satisfy this desire for 
change in the spiritual world in connection with 
the underlying nature of the changes sought 
for. The methods by which the intellectual 
powers are wrought into physical processes and 
physical processes are made to sustain intellect- 
ual powers ; by which ethical convictions gain 
expression in social organism and social or- 
ganism nourishes ethical convictions ; by which 
human consciousness becomes clear, extended, 
and self-sustaining, cannot be pushed hastily 
to a completion. Haste means at once dark- 
ness and confusion. Nor has the movement 
ever been so slow as to rob any of us, the 
brightest of us, of something to do and to win; 
so slow as to fatigue our powers by inactivity. 
We are not, as those who wait on the endless 
delays of a great procession, worn out by stand- 
ing; we are rather as the overtaxed marshal, 
who finds the time only too short for what is to 
be done in it. If we were hurried, there would 
'be a want of depth in our knowledge and of 


78 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


strength in our action. Great blanks would 
show themselves in our experience. 

When events have seemed to hasten for- 
ward, as in the French Revolution, or as in 
the physical progress of the last half-century, 
or as in the temperance reform, they have 
been followed by a flurry of thought and much 
failure in action. We have now thrown upon 
us many new and urgent social problems as 
the result of increased productive powers, and 
if we fail to give them sober and sufficient an- 
swers, that failure will soon arrest our physical 
progress. We may well doubt whether the 
world, as one whole, does not move forward 
with a pace as rapid as we can sustain, our 
physical, our intellectual, and our spiritual pow- 
ers keeping step. 

We, as a people, are threatened with the 
bewilderment and intoxication of too many 
things. Our young men grow callous under 
them, and urgent social and political questions 
plead in vain for attention. Like children, we 
have laid hold of more balls than our small 
hands can handle. May it not be asserted 
that our spiritual growth is so a part of the 
system of things in which we are enclosed, 
that it approaches irrationality to ask for a de- 


The Diffusion of Gains. 79 


velopment materially different from that which 
occupies us, spreads out our tasks and brings 
our rewards? Is it not true that every spiritual 
impulse which arises in man and in society has 
an immediate field for expenditure? Is it not 
true that when straitened, we are straitened in 
ourselves rather than in our circumstances Peels 
this is not strictly and always true of the individ- 
ual, is it not because, in the integration of soci- 
ety, the individual necessarily bears its burden ? 


“ If we take any two periods of society, the present, for 
example, and that of a thousand or five thousand years 
ago, we shall find enormous or incalculably great differ- 
ences in social structure, in the amount of knowledge, in 
the character of the ethical, religious, and philosophical 
beliefs, and in the relations of the individuals of which 
society 1s constructed ; but between the individuals of 
the two periods we may find hardly any definable differ- 
ence whatever.” * 


The test of spiritual growth is not light here 
or light there, on this topic or that topic, but 
the spread of the spiritual kingdom to its 
proper bounds, its structure within itself as a 
kingdom. Nor does the advanced individual 
win his own otherwise than in his relations to 
the whole. As long as the masses remain an 


* Leslie Stephen, Social Rights and Duties, vol. ii., p. 29. 


80 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


opaque lump, translucent to no truth, they 
will throw back on the brightest minds 
heavy shadows. We shall find a Plato accept- 
ing slavery, and breaking up the household. 
‘If it is a sound assertion, that ‘the degree in 
which any ethical theory recognizes and re- 
veals the essential importance of the family 
‘relation is the best test of its approximation to 
the truth,” * then this spiritual integration of 
which we are in search must spread through the 
whole human household, whose members are 
everywhere busy in framing the family, casting 
safety about it, and kindling light within it. 
All later organic units must depend on this 
primitive unit which enters into them all. 

The march of the race is like the march of 
an army. It can lose no division and sacrifice 
no-supplies. Its safety is composite. The 
flow of human life is like that of a great river. 
Its eddies, its bendings, its level stretches 
through which it creeps onward, are incidents 
of the system of which it is a part, but do not 
alter its purpose and destination. 

The feeling which leads us to regard prog- 
ress as too slow is allied to that which leads us 
to think of it as too exacting. The mind plays 

* Leslie Stephen, Social Rights and Duties, vol. ii., p. 244. 


Discipline and Natural Law. 81 


indolently with difficulties and with possi- 
bilities, and makes no sober, adequate adjust- 
ment of them to each other. Its connections 
are those of a series of images, not of a series 
of causes. The same persons who reject 
miracles as inconsistent with universal law, 
will sometimes object to natural law as too 
severe and pitiless. Natural law falls very 
heavily, at times, on individuals, and commu- 
nities, and nations. Is this fact in evidence 
against the goodness of God? We shall 
answer this question according to our sense of 
the disciplinary value of natural law in the 
world; our sense of the evils which must ac- 
company any uncertainty in that law, any 
playing fast and loose with it. The govern- 
ment of the world is to be interpreted as a 
system of law, natural and ethical. Is it 
thereby a better government than it would 
otherwise be ? Have we occasion to rejoice in 
it by virtue of this its rational character ? When 
we remember how men love to evade their own 
responsibilities ; how glad they are to rely on 
some good fortune or divine intervention ; the 
many ways in which they soften or escape the 
claims of reason, we are compelled to look 
upon this firmness and uniformity of the 
6 


a, 


82. Objections to God’s Goodness. 


divine law as a cardinal feature in the disci- 
pline of the world. 

The shock of an earthquake falls on a city, 
an entail of evil passes from parent to child: 
it is left to us to say that this hardship of 
method should in some way be softened. Yet a 


scheme of things is to be judged as one whole. 


If accepted in its primary purpose, it must be 
conceded in its necessary parts. Not all things, 
but only coherent things, belong to a rational 


‘system. Continuity of causes and soundness 


of reasons constitute one self - sustaining 
method. An escape from the captious, incon- 


sequential, and fanciful; the enforcement of 
the genetic, real, and eternal, are fundamental 
parts of our experience. We must find God, 
working by a method of great scope. The 
creative character of the work, the magnitude 
and universality of its conditions, the impres- 
sion that these elements make upon our 
thoughts and feelings, the training to which 
they subject us, the trifling importance which 
attaches to what may seem to us serious 
disaster, the many ways in which the physical 
is redeemed by concurrent spiritual events, in 
which spiritual forces react upon and correct 
physical facts, are all to be borne in mind in 


Suffering. 83 


judging the grandeur and creative power of the 
[present system. This meeting God in the 
world, as a stubborn and monotonous fact, 
may not be walking with Him in the Garden 
of Eden in the cool of the evening, but it is 


none the less a cogent spiritual experience. 


That we are dealing with realities of great im- 
port, for good or for evil, is a first principle in 
our discipline; and a farther implication of 
this principle is, that this discipline must have 
way, though it be severe, when it is involved in 
universal and beneficent law. Is it not a rea- 
sonable claim that we should leave these in- 
teractions of law and limits of law with Him 
who alone has the wisdom to frame them? It 
‘is not the claim of reason that every single 
‘action of God should at once seem rational to 


‘us; but that the immeasurable overbalance of 
| wisdom and goodness should be open to us. 


A third objection to the goodness of God, 
one which gathers up all other objections, is 
the immense amount of suffering incident to 
His government,—a government which, in pur- 
suing its ends, conceding them to be creative, 
scatters failure, overthrow, and death on every 
side. Only an alert and elect few seem to be 
saved. 


84 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


The method of the world is not to be 
judged by the immediate happiness conferred, 
nor by some possible increase of that happi- 
ness. It is spiritual life which is offered as the 
ultimate purpose of discipline, and the happi- 
ness which is to accrue is to follow after it, 
and be incident to this high attainment. The 
lowest terms in pleasure—sensuous enjoyment, 
gratified passions—are not to rule the higher 
terms,— spiritual affections,—but are to be 
ruled by them. The ethical activities, pursuing 
their own functions, are to bring with them 
blessings of their own high quality. We are 
‘to judge the tree, not by the crude fruit which 
may first be ripened upon it, but by its mature 
product. The question is, therefore, not 
~whether there is suffering in the discipline of . 
life, but whether it is gratuitous suffering, 
suffering not involved in the end proposed. 
Heroism equally with goodness implies suffer- 
ing, and he alone is heroic who despises the 
difficulties and dangers that lie in his path. 

There has been a strong tendency in connec- 
tion with empirical philosophy, to magnify the 
suffering of the world. It arises from an un- 
duly liberal estimate of the powers of animals ; 
from a reduction of the moral element in man ; 


IPO 


Suffering of Animals. 85 


and from the heavy service laid upon suffering 
as a working forcein evolution. The suffering 
which seems most to militate against the good- 
ness of God is that of animals. It is disasso- 
ciated with moral discipline, and has in itself no 
higher justification to plead than that of sen- 
suous welfare. The animal, it is true, as’an 
inferior member in a great system, may be left 
to share the fortunes of that system. The de- 
feated army or the victorious army suffers 
alike, man and beast. Yet we would wish 
that, on its own narrow basis of pleasure, the 
good, in the case of the animal, should greatly 
overbalance the evil. Life in the animal, as in 
man, is a very distinct good, and one little 
harassed by disease, hunger, cold and fear. 
There can be no pain without consciousness. 
Pain must be proportioned to the extent and 
delicacy of consciousness. Our intellectual, 
our conscious, life is built on organic, instinc- 
tive life ; supplements it and, in a measure, dis- 
|places it. As the conscious life of man is his 
distinctive characteristic, and has received 
much extension by evolution, we are not at 
liberty to reason, without much reservation, 
from man to the brute in estimating pains and 
/pleasures. So reasoning, we attribute far more 


86 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


to the conscious life and far less to the instinc- 
tive life in the animal, than we ought. In 
spite of the great extension and assiduous 
exercise of our conscious activities, much goes 
on for good or for evil in our own bodies of 
which we are notaware. Nota little muscular 
action and even emotional expression take 
place in us with no accompaniment of pains or 
pleasures. 

Our voluntary and reflective powers are co- 
ordinated by sensibilities. Our sensibilities 
are correspondingly increased. Consciousness 
pushes from above downward, not from beneath 
upward. As we descend, the darkness rapidly 
increases. The range of consciousness may 
not only be less, it is sure to be very much less, 
in the animal than in the man ; in the brutal man 
than in the refined man. Much that puts on 
the appearance of suffering, as the wriggling 
of the earthworm divided by the spade, may 
not be accompanied by the least suffering. 
Indeed, any suffering that does not serve a 
protective purpose is not to be presumed. 
It would be eliminated, not less by God's 
goodness than by natural selection. Pain that 
does not protect the vital powers wastes them, 
and burdens the animal in the race of life. 


Suffering and Discipline. 87 


We are certainly at liberty to believe that in 
the economy of sensitive, organic beings pain 
is limited to protection, while pleasure is held 
fast as a full realization of power —a self-sus- 
jtaining term. The immense increase of suffer- 
‘ing, as the field of consciousness is widened 
and the voluntary powers take the lead, is 
incident to a higher discipline of which the 
‘animal knows very little. 

The eagerness with which the empiricist, at 
times, insists on the suffering of animals has in 
it something of the perversity of atheory. He 
casts downward the lights and shadows of hu- 
man life on to animal life. Weare to presume 
neither fear nor suffering which is not an im- 
mediate term of safety. Observation confirms 
this view. Timid animals do not show them- 
selves harassed by remote dangers. 

A similar principle is applicable to our esti- 
mate of the sufferings of men. The lower 
the intellectual life the ruder is the nervous 
organism, the less its sensibility to pain. We 
fall into constant error in judging the experi- 
ences of inferior persons and races. We unite 
in them incongruous elements — our sensibili- 
ties and their circumstances. The two are 
never joined and never can be. Sensibilities 


88 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


and circumstances are in constant action and 
reaction, and so establish, if not a perfect, a 
bearable harmony. We shall judge human 
experiences best by clinging somewhat closely 
to our own experience, in its general charac- 
teristics. Every experience is a unity within 
itself. If that unity, offered in our own lives, 
brings with it a proximately comfortable life,— 
oftentimes too comfortable, one of varied 
possibilities and promises,—we may believe 
that other lives, in spite of their apparent di- 
versities, are doing much the same thing. The 
inevitable processes of adaptation and growth 
are operative inthemasinus. Our own moral 
problem is apprehensible by us. It yields 
light and gives discipline. So is it with each 
one. By no other terms does life become 
moral than by these distinct shades of conduct 
near at hand, and by choice between them. 
We have no occasion to fear that in the moral 
world heavy responsibilities will rest on weak 
shoulders. Weakness, ignorance, misappre- 
hension, are their own protection. 

Take the African in his welter of tropical 
vices, his witchcrafts, his credulities, his cruel- 
ties. This blind struggle with a fanciful 
world of malignant spirits—reflections of those 


A Moral Struggle Everywhere. 89 


who gaze into the stream of events—is most 
repulsive to us, and may at times seem diabol- 
ical. Yet how long is it since we escaped from 
witchcraft! What superstitious notions, the 
trailing shreds of dissolving clouds, still infest 
us! Weare still struggling with the waste, pas- 
sion, and suffering of war, and have no final and 
rational reason to offer in its defence, save 
that of our common stupidity and blunted 
sensibilities. 

It is not of so much moment where, and 
about what centres, the moral struggle is tak- 
ing place, as it is that there is such a struggle 
forever going forward. Two savages, in an un- 
broken forest, may find a training in the craft of 
war not altogether unlike that of a Napoleon 
at the head of European armies; and with a loss 
but an infinitesimal part of that which accom- 
panied the more conspicuous conflict. Spiritual 
growth will answer all questions, shake off all 
embarrassments, push back all darkness and 
declare itself by its own life—like the seed that 
has pierced the soil and now deals with sunlight. 
It is the very function of spiritual life, in its 
final unfoldings, to correct the ups and downs 
of sensuous good, to make trifling what seemed 
hopeless delay, and to disclose the true wealth 


90 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


of our resources. It is the vegetation under it 
that tests the actual capacity of a climate. 
Accepting freely, after all abatements, a large 
remainder of suffering, we cannot feel that it 
occasions any impenetrable darkness in the 
world. In our physical mechanism, it is cor- 
rective and instructive. It is one of the terms 
in which all economic and social problems gain 
expression. It constitutes the shadows, the 
varying intensity of the light; and these are 
the conditions of all spiritual revelation. The 
stimuli of action, its cautions and its encour- 
agements, are all present in this interplay of 
pain and pleasure. So true is this that the 
elimination of pain from a world like our own 
leaves it inconceivable as a field of rational 
activity. It is drawing the threads of a rich 
fabric, and still hoping to retain its strength. 
The one idea which chiefly sums up the ser- 
vice of suffering, so far as man is concerned, is 
that of discipline, spiritual evolution. To bear 
suffering, to relieve suffering, to despise suffer- 
ing, to rise above suffering by means of it, to 
correct, in its presence, all our devices for doing 
good, to make our action as intelligent as it is 
sympathetic, to establish a parallelism between 
our resources and our wishes, this is a training 


Suffering and Spiritual Evolution. 91 


which is of the very substance of human 
strength. Ignorance, stubbornness, | shilly- 
shally, perish in its presence. Patience, insight, 
skill, good-will, thrive upon it. To stand be- 
tween pain and pleasure, disturbed by neither, 
a master of both, is like planting one’s feet on 
a mountain pinnacle, the chasms on either hand 
imparting only a more sublime sense of safety 
and elevation. 

This is the enthusiasm, but it is also the 
sober experience, of the world. The purified 
ones are those who have walked through fire ; 
and the firehas not hurt them. The best men, 
those most aware of the suffering of the world 
and most anxious to relieve it, have usually 
been those least disposed to shirk it, or to cen- 
sure it. The heat and the heavy blows by 
which men’s thoughts and actions are welded 
together, link by link, into that chain which 
binds the soul to righteousness, are encoun- 
tered in connection with suffering. 


‘‘A solemn, a terrible, but a very joyous and noble 
universe; whose suffering is not at least wantonly in- 
flicted, though it falls with dispassionate partiality, but 
where it may be and generally is nobly borne ; where 
above all any brave man may make out a life which 
shall be happy for himself, and by so being, beneficent 


92 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


to those about him.’”* “The lofty and simple nature 
knows instinctively that grief, terrible as it is, is yet, in 
another sense, an invaluable possession. The sufferer who 
has eaten his bread with herbs learns, as the poet puts it, 
to know the heavenly powers.” + 


“Then, welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth’s smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 
Be our joys threée-parts pain ! 
Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the 
throe!” f 


“After a course of bitter mental discipline and long 
bodily seclusion, I came out with two learned lessons, 
the wisdom of cheerfulness and the duty of social inter- 
course. Anguish had instructed me in joy, and solitude 
in society.”’ || 


The spirit that shrinks from pain, that is ex- 
acting of pleasure, and querulous in the world’s 
contact, so far lacks the germs of nobility as to 
make its redemption most difficult. Many a 
plain man, simply by the patience with which 
he has endured exposure and pain, has forced 
the spiritual gates. There is no exhortation 
which returns more uniformly to all men than 

* Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. + Loid, 
¢ Robert Browning. 


|| Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Letters of Robert Browning and 
Llizabeth Barrett, vol. i., D.. 30% 


Prosperity and Virtue. 93 


this: Endure hardship, as good soldiers of the 
(cross. So universal has been this association 
‘of strength with suffering, that many, in all 
“races and religions, have fallen into the error 
of accepting self-inflicted pain as a part of a 
purifying process, 

If it can be stated as a general truth, that 
those who have endured suffering in an heroic 
temper, who have cheerfully accepted it as an 
essential term in life, have so far been helped 
by it as to make it a leading feature in the for- 
mation of character, then we can hardly do 
otherwise than concede its necessity in a great 
system of things which puts spiritual strength 
foremost. 

In a just estimate of the discipline of ad. 
versity, we need to contrast it, under present 

‘conditions, with that of prosperity. Few in- 
| dividuals and no nations have thriven long on 
/prosperity. Prosperity has been a stormy 
-spiritual headland which no fleet has doubled 
andridden quietly inthe peaceful waters beyond. 
Take a moment when the inflowing tide of 
business is in full sweep. How eager, hard, 
unscrupulous and unsympathetic the business 
man becomes! A group, in unrestrained con- 
versation, might easily be taken for partisan 


94 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


leaders, contemplating a marauding expedition. 

The public welfare sinks out of sight, and 
,every one claims a free hand. Pride anda 
sense of power take possession of the success- 
‘ful few, and a feeling of unfairness and injury 
settles down, like a chilling mist, on the many. 
Society begins at once, under these repel- 
lent feelings, to disintegrate, and when some 
severe pressure arises it goes to pieces. Men 
are thrown once more back into the school 
of adversity, until they are again ready for 
union and a fresh struggle with prosperity. 
Adversity sharpens and burnishes the spiritual 
weapons with which we drive back the appe- 
tites, passions, and desires so hastily spawned 
by prosperity. 

We should also bear in mind that we enter 
into the joys of others very largely by entering 
into their sufferings. If we care nothing for 
their pains, we shall care very little for their 
pleasures. A large share of human life will 
be shut off from us as ministering to our en- 
joyment. The sympathy extended to suffer- 
ing opens the hearts of men to each other, and 
makes them thenceforward partakers in each 
other’s blessings. If the pungent experiences 
of pain do nothing to unlock the heart, the less 


Faith and Suffering. 95 


pungent ones of pleasure will pass it by un- 
touched. 
| If the framework of events is beneficent, we 


_are not to bring a petty and vexatious criticism 
jto every detail. We are to be modest and 
wise in our thoughts, as well as earnest and 
assiduous. We are to have confidence in the 
good, to believe in its purging and purifying 
power. We are not to abide in the presence 
of a system so infinitely comprehensive and 
trust nothing to it. While we measure freely 
with our own thoughts the world about us, and 
stand firmly upon it, we must, none the less, gain 
the momentum of those large and lively infer- 
ences which belong to the immense things that 
envelop us. 

Certainly the suffering of the world offers a 
case in which faith wins a rational victory 
in seeing and accepting the trend of events, 
before the proof forces its way into the sensu- 
ous world—a mere impingement of light and 
sound, All life is good. If we raise the 
question, Is life worth living? we do it in the 
presence of some failure or miscarriage of life. 
The hilarity of physical powers, the exhilara- 
tion of intellectual activity, the repose of spir- 

-itual affections, are so supreme as to admit of 


96 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


no disparagement ; so supreme, as to cast the 
light of joy on every path by which we mount 
up to them. The clearing up of human con- 
sciousness, confused and obscured by conflict 
and suffering, is as the return of blue sky after 
the storms and darkness of the night. The 
change, once accomplished, puts beyond regret 
the events that have led up to it. 

There is no method by which a fellowship 
with the redemptive Spirit of Truth is more 
assured unto us than this of sharing the labor 
and the suffering of the world. 


“ For pleasant is this flesh ; 
Our soul, in its rose-mesh 
Pull’d ever to the earth, still yearns for rest ; 
Would we some prize might hold 
To match those manifold 
Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best !’’* 


If we have some just sense of the breadth 
and openness of the spiritual life, the evils inci- 
dent to the journey thither will certainly weigh 
light with us; if we have not as yet caught 
this vision, then every step which leads to it is 
our only hope. Light retains its true charac- 
ter even if for the moment it seems quite shut 
out. 


* Robert Browning. 


Redemption from Suffering. 97 


Not only are the problems of the world 
given to us in terms of pleasure and pain; not 
only is the inner spiritual significance of events 
constantly coming to the surface in crimson 
colors, glad or portentous according to the 
light that plays upon them; it becomes a per- 
manent duty of man, concurrent with divine 
labor, to eliminate pain and promote pleasure, 
to make the whole spiritual landscape respond 
with contentment to the sunshine which falls 

jupon it. What method could be more signifi- 
cant than that pain should have found its way 
into the world as a constructive physical term, 
should have been to man expository of the 
}problem of life, and should then give way be- 
\fore a growing spiritual development! Thus 
man redeems his inheritance from thorns. 
Whether we shall do our own redemptive 
work or have it done for us is very much like 
asking whether the sunlight shall play among 
the clouds as they clear away, or whether this 
significant work shall take place in midnight 
darkness and the results be flung at once upon 
us as bald midday. 

The possibility of an almost complete ex- 
pulsion of pain by the hand of man and the 
providence of God is indubitable. Let a 

7 


98 Objections to God’s Goodness. 


| thoroughly intelligent and loving purpose find 
expression in the actions of men for a hundred 

_ years only, and with the passing away of neg- 

_ligence, ill-will, and cruelty nearly the whole 
troop of pain would have disappeared. The 
providence of God, voicing itself in human 
sympathy, would gather close about us, and the 
laws of inheritance would be freighted with 
ever-increasing blessings. 

The domestic animals, which now suffer so 
much at the hand of man, would have entered 
into an elysium of good things. In place of 
the repression of violence, which has charac- 
terized the animal kingdom, we should have 
a prevenient grace, eliminating a strife and 
rapine no longer the primary term in the equi- 
librium of life. Pain would sink into a wholly 
secondary element in evolution, an idle index 
travelling almost without observation along its 
graduated circle. Pain would be hardly more 
than the decimal point from which the great 
aggregates of pleasure would take their rise. 

In this question of the goodness of God, we 
are to remember that suffering is not a dead 
weight which must be carried any way, but a 
changeable, disciplinary burden which skill and 
good-will can make almost inappreciable. 


Suffering Part of a System. 99 


Neither is there in the world any spasmodic 
outbreak of cruelty, which is wont to charac- 
terize a nature tainted with ill-will. Pain is 
ever held under rigid law, close to its con- 
structive purpose. 

If, then, God proposes eel life, spiritual 
power, pain is an essential of a scheme in itself 
so gracious. By it we are enclosed with Him 
in His own work of love. Our surface of con- 
tact is first pain, then pleasure, the one the 
prelude and energy of the other. As severe 
suffering is followed by the ecstasy of relief, 
so our experience of evil measures our capacity 
for good and our sense of its grand, compre- 
hensive nature. 


BA: 


CONCLUSIONS. 


Iort 


The living Heaven. thy prayers respect, 
House at once and architect, 
Quarrying man’s rejected hours, 
Builds therewith eternal towers ; 
Sole and self-commanded works, 
Fears not undermining days, 
Grows by decays, 
And, by the famous might that lurks 
In reaction and recoil, 
Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil, 
Forging, through swart arms of Offence, 
The silver seat of Innocence. 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Spiritual Laws. 


102 


prey 


ievavinoa hy Ais. 
CONCLUSIONS, 


ie remains to gather together, somewhat more 

compactly, the points we have made and 
the conclusions we have reached. The entire 
discussion is based upon the belief that the spirit- 
ual world is the fulfillment of the physical world, 
that it is a construction of its own supreme 
order, proximately apprehensible by us in its 
nature and purposes. .The reason which is in 
the world is referred to the Supreme Reason, 
which encloses it, and is one with it. All rea- 
son is personal from its very nature,—is the 
substance of personality. The Supreme Rea- 
son cannot exist outside the world, because the 
world is ordered from within and is the chief 
expression of wisdom. This Reason which 


rules the world is immanent in the world. Yet 


it transcends the world, it carries with it a 
conscious life of its own, or it ceases to be rea- 
son. Thus the mind of man works as a living 
principle in the body, and at the same time 


transcends the body. 


103 


104 Conclusions. 


The ethical law is the supreme law of the 
spiritual world, the law put by reason upon 
itself; and hence the absolute ethical excel- 
lence of God is as essential to the conception 
of God as are infinite wisdom and _ power. 
Without these attributes he loses his compre- 
hending force. The spiritual world becomes 
under the ethical law a perfect creation. As 
the source and fullness of this righteousness, 
God gathers all things into Himself. If this re- 
lation fails us, our thoughts drop back at once 
into confusion. God, that He may be God, 
must be the seat of the harmonizing power of the 
spiritual world. Any uncertainty as to God's 
love is uncertainty as to His supreme ration- 
ality, is uncertainty as to the origin and end of 
spiritual life, is uncertainty as to His own being. 

The goodness of God companions with the 
wisdom of God, and the two find expression in 
the unfolding of a spiritual kingdom. The 
goodness of God is to be apprehended, there- 
fore, in connection with this kingdom, and 
with the movement of events toward it. The 
things manifestly being accomplished, slowly, it 
is true, but with undeniable certainty, in this 
human, spiritual world of ours, hold in them- 
selves the solution of that world. 


Three Integrations. 105 


We found three distinct but closely united 
processes, widely embracing human life and 
all looking to a spiritual kingdom. The first 
of these was a more complete integration of 
the physical and the spiritual terms of life, as 
that life is developed into a richer, wider, more 
spiritual consciousness. The body of man 
and with it the physical world at large are 
thereby brought into more immediate and per- 
fect response to spiritual wants and spiritual 
powers. The apparent conflict between these 
two terms disappears. The two are interlaced 
in the closest dependence, as the development 
of the spirit of man proceeds within itself. 
The complete integrity of the world declares 
itself. 

A second integration consists in an equally 
slow interfusion of the intellectual and the 
ethical life in man. The two unfold side by 
side in constant interaction. The intellec- 
tual nature propounds the evermore complex 
problems of conduct while the moral nature 
solves them. The two sustain and correct 
each other through the entire field of human 
activity. The light of life emerges at this 
centre of ethical discussion and spreads thence 
in all directions. 


106 Conclusion. 


The third integration is that of man with 
man in society—the integration by which 
human companionship passes into the King- 
dom of Heaven. These three integrations are 
mutually dependent. The ethical movement 
by which we reach the spiritual law of love is 
central, working downward that it may subor- 
dinate to itself the physical terms of its activity 
and bow the world in submission to its su- 
preme form of life, spreading outward that it 
may bring all parts of the one kingdom into 
the general interplay of power and love. 
Without this physical transformation the 
ground once won to spiritual insight could not 
be quietly held. Without this social transfor- 
mation individual life could not secure the 
volume, permanence, variety, and quality 
which yield a spiritual construction truly 
cosmic. All these integrations must proceed 
together in one common consciousness, aiding 
and retarding each other, otherwise the prod- 
uct is not truly spiritual. 

This sense of the scope and overruling force 
of the divine plan so establishes the goodness 
of God that we attach no very great weight to 
the many objections to that goodness—as negli- 
gence and delay—of which the world at first 


Happiness Rightly Conceived. 107 


sight seems so full. We feel disposed to 
sweep them aside somewhat summarily, as in- 
evitably incident to our narrow vision —as 
clouds that linger after the sunlight has 
struck through. 

In the physical world suffering is construc- 
tive ; in the spiritual world it opens up the prob- 
lems of life and is a leading incentive in their 
solution. It gives its essential flavor to noble 
conduct. Life is revalescent, and enters into 
itself by virtue of suffering. The man who 
confronts the world cheerfully in its sorrow and 
pain, who bears patiently his portion of them, 
and beats it back perseveringly at every point, 
is hourly made greater, better, happier, thereby. 

The world, so far, has not been able to put 
intelligently to itself the problem of life. It 
has not known what to pray for. The happi- 
ness which it has coveted it has not been able 
to reconcile with itself. | Neither the receiver 
nor the participator nor the bystander has been 
blessed by it. Granted in its crude terms it 
has quickly miscarried in some new form of suf- 
fering. The world has been thought of by 
good menasa ‘‘vale of tears,” and goodness as 
the means of escape from it. No revelation 
of God’s purposes is possible to this frame of 


108 Conclusion. 


mind, A continuous and tormenting entail of 
suffering can alone suffice to reveal the problem 
and bring it to a better solution. 

The good, in the measure of their goodness, 
have thought lightly of suffering as it has 
touched themselves, and have sought most as- 
siduously and sympathetically for those high 
paths in which men walk together in aidfulness 
and love. They have found their goodness in 
a sense of the goodness of God, and have given 
it expression in an effort to carry forward His 
redemptive and constructive purposes. The 
one attitude of mind which is divine in its in- 
cipiency, vigorous in its growth, and glad in its 
fulfillment, is that by which we find and follow 
the lead of God from darkness into light, from 
pain into pleasure, from death into life. If we 
have a supreme sense of the worth of spiritual 
life, and of its comprehensiveness ; if we judge 
the world as a means of perfecting and spread- 
ing abroad that life ; if we walk with God in the 
fulfillment of this purpose, the difficulties and 
darkness which remain become simply a rugged, 
but a suitable, discipline of our powers. The 
joy of the movement conceals its hardship and 
nullifies its fatigue. 


Date Due 


Se 


F - 


x 


IN U. S.A. 


PRINTED 


cS 


